Deconstructing Moyahttp://farscape.madeoffail.net
A Farscape Re-Watch Project! Updated every Friday with a new episode review.Mon, 30 Jun 2014 00:24:18 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.4DeconstructingMoyahttps://feedburner.google.comSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with NewsGatorSubscribe with My AOLSubscribe with BloglinesSubscribe with NetvibesSubscribe with GoogleSubscribe with PageflakesSubscribe with PlusmoSubscribe with The Free DictionarySubscribe with Bitty BrowserSubscribe with Live.comSubscribe with Excite MIXSubscribe with WebwagSubscribe with Podcast ReadySubscribe with WikioSubscribe with Daily RotationTessa’s take on Farscape: The Peacekeeper Warshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DeconstructingMoya/~3/bB1ybH7PShk/
http://farscape.madeoffail.net/episodes/tessas-take-on-farscape-the-peacekeeper-wars/#commentsTue, 03 Jun 2014 00:10:05 +0000http://farscape.madeoffail.net/?p=2695Today, on Farscape…

“Your father and I want you to have a name that means courage and strength. So we have chosen D’Argo Sun Crichton.”

“Little D, we don’t know what life has in store for you, but whatever it is, you’ll figure something out.”

Oh man. I remember now why we ran into so much trouble working out how to tackle this thing, there’s just SO MUCH packed into it that I’m frankly a little overwhelmed. I made two separate attempts to get this write-up going prior to this and discarded both because I was just getting lost trying to get through everything and it was winding up a jumbled mess. Thankfully Noel has done a fantastic summarized write-up already that digs into the details, and he very kindly agreed to let me bounce off of that so that I can just put out my overall thoughts on things (which works out anyways since you guys don’t need two bit-by-bit summaries of this).

Okay, first off, have to agree that there are bits that just feel off about the characters. Some of the makeup looks a bit wonky. Not actually BAD, the jobs themselves are still great, but some of them don’t seem quite right. But well, there was a pretty huge amount of time in between the series and this mini, so it’s totally forgivable that the footing’s a bit shaky there.

Also totally agree that Pilot’s voice is a bit harder to ignore. He just sounds so weird, and the majority of the time sounds much closer to Crais than Pilot. It was really distracting and hard to get past at first, although it was also something I was able to get over.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the setup of the “Rygel ate the baby” sub-plot. We’re just supposed to kind of swallow both that the bit of crystallization that the baby was contained in somehow just de-crystallized in his stomach (which conveniently must have just been its own separate crystal and didn’t take any of Aeryn’s organs with her), and that Rygel somehow has the means to sustain a rapidly developing fetus in there, both being able to get it whatever nutrients it needs along with not accidentally digesting it in the process. I guess it could be that Aeryn’s entire womb got transplanted into him (which still doesn’t quite make sense), but that’s not what we’re told, Aeryn’s not suffering any ill effects of having a body part ripped from her and they really only say that the baby is missing, and nothing else (if I recall correctly the Diagnosian says there’s nothing wrong with Aeryn anyways, so that probably isn’t it).

The more I think about it, the more I really don’t like the crystallization/decrystallization thing in general. Aside from the cheap “oh they’re dead wait no they aren’t” thing going on, there’s no clear rules set up for how the whole thing works. Why wasn’t the wedding ring crystallized also? It’s not a case of the crystallization only affecting organic matter, because the rest of their clothing and their guns were part of that too. I guess it could have been another case of Rygel magically decrystallizing something in his stomach, but the way he talks about it makes it pretty clear that he found it intact and was holding back on giving it over on purpose. Aside from that, the crystallization weapon/beam/whatever thing seems like a hell of a defensive weapon for the Eidolons to have at their disposal, so… why don’t we see any evidence of them using it to defend themselves when the Scarrans show up? They use it at the drop of a hat to disintegrate two intruders who may or may not be hostile, but an army of very-definitely-going-to-kill you lizard people are off-limits for it? I’d have even taken an off-hand mention of some kind of handwave like the beam not working on Scarran physiology or some bullcrap like that, but the mini seems to completely forget about the whole thing entirely once John and Aeryn are put back together.

Still, the pregnant Rygel sub-plot does set up a lot of fun comedic moments with our favorite Dominar, as he’s suddenly turned into the MacGuffin that the crew needs to keep safe for the first half of the mini. You’d expect for him to take advantage of the fact that he’s suddenly become so important to the crew (and he does try to get a bit of gloating in only for Aeryn to very pointedly shut him down), but the situation is so uncomfortable for him that it keeps him in check. The overall sub-plot hits so many fun moments both during and after Rygel carrying the child that I’m willing to let them hand-wave the premise.

I didn’t realize how much I missed watching Wayne Pygram’s antics on screen until I got to see him at work again. Partially as Scorpius, but mostly as Harvey. I had completely forgotten that Harvey made a return at the end of Season 4, and I literally squealed when we hop into John’s mind and see him done up as Albert Einstein channeling Doctor Strangelove. Overall I just ate up every bit of him we got in this, between the mad scientist, the crash test dummy, the building foreman, and finally the 2001 homage. I still just love the contrast between the ever-serious Scorpius and what the entity that started out as more or less an exact copy of him morphed into over time. Pygram acts the hell out of both and it’s a testament to his ability that the two characters that look more or less identical (most of the time, anyways) can be so different and yet both feel so right.

…yup, gushing over Scorpius and Harvey, right back to where I was with this whole thing all along.

I like the Eidolons as a concept, although I agree with Noel that their development feels a bit rushed. Out of necessity, admittedly, with everything they were trying to cram in here. But a race of… uh… what’s the opposite of empaths? Exopaths? I dunno. But a race of aliens who can influence peace through psychic influence being revealed to be the originator of the Peacekeepers as their law-enforcing muscle is a really cool idea and I wish we’d been able to explore it more. I really like the concept that the Peacekeepers were developed to do a specific job and then were effectively ditched as their peace-influencing bosses went into stasis, and so reached their over-militaristic current state not through malevolence or power-hunger but simply as a struggle to keep doing their job after the means to have the hard part magicked away disappeared. It’s an awesome bit of fleshing out to the species (along with a potential link back to humanity teased in there), and I’m a little bummed that there’s only time for a few passing lines to be dedicated to it before we just move along. Overall the miniseries leaves me just wondering what we could have gotten with a full season to explore all of these concepts completely.

Noel pointed out Harvey attempting to get John to commit suicide during the crash test scene, but it’s worth pointing out the context – it’s while Staleek is in the module with him. He’s not trying to get John to kill himself, necessarily, he’s trying to get him to kill the Scarran emperor. Of course, at the cost of his own life in the bargain, but Harvey seems to find that worthwhile. It’s a small difference, but I feel like it’s worth clarifying, it’s not a case of Harvey being out to kill John here.

I’m not sure how I feel about Maryk as the Peacekeeper Grand Chancellor. He’s kind of played off as being almost completely incompetent, as he bumbles from battle to battle, consistently losing each one to the Scarrans. It’s probably not entirely his fault, as he points out just how long the Scarrans have been planning this war and just waiting for an excuse to pull the trigger, but we don’t see much of anything go right for him. His assassination is very nearly of enormous importance, when Yondalao manages to convince Staleek to broker peace under the guise of demanding surrender, Scorpius notes that Maryk is smart enough to take it, and assumedly Grayza would be significantly less inclined to accept the deal in his place. I kind of thought briefly that she would be the wrench in the works, and my stomach dropped at hearing Scorpius’ words knowing what had happened, but Ahkna ruins the plan anyways long before there’s even a chance for Grayza’s seizing of control to have any consequence to the overall plot, so the whole thing kind of felt a little pointless since although I feel like we should be worried about her being back in charge, they don’t actually do anything with it and her role by the end is really just for her to be there. It ups the stakes in a way but doesn’t really affect our heroes much at all.

D’Argo and Chiana’s fake death is fake. Woo. I’m not exactly sure how we’re supposed to believe they survived the explosion completely unscathed or how Chiana survives hanging out in open space for as long as she does, buuuuut yeah. Nothing new, but it still bugs me significantly that they still leaned hard on that plot device even here. D’Argo’s actual death (I won’t lie, I cried pretty hard) later is impactful as hell, but I can’t help feeling like it might have felt even more impactful had they not pulled the rug out from under us yet again at the halfway point.

I wasn’t really surprised at all when Sikozu wound up being the actual spy. Grunchlk was just too blindingly obvious a decoy for it, and Ahkna being so vague about who her spy was was basically a huge red flag that the culprit wasn’t who we were being led to believe.

I can’t just give the offhand mention to D’Argo’s death (for reals this time) that I did above and let that be it. His last moments hurt like hell, with Chiana frantically insisting they save him and getting more and more hysterical as the rest of the crew realizes that there’s not much of anything they can do to save him. As much as I’ve been on the series’ case for abusing the hell out of the concept of killing off it’s characters, this scene just felt right as soon as it hit home that D’Argo’s wound wasn’t something he was going to be able to shake off. His final moments with each of the crew members speaks volumes about the relationship and respect he’s earned from all of them. Looking way back at season one, at his bickering with John and their conversation about how they’ll never be friends, and comparing it to his final pained conversation with him, as Crichton tells him he’s the best friend he’s ever had with desperation in his voice is just massively powerful. As much as Farscape has been about anything else (and it’s been about a lot), it’s been a story of a young Luxan growing up and taking charge of his life in the name of protecting the family he stumbled into having, and this is a magnificent cap off to that story and a fitting send-off to his character.

Just as powerful is Chiana’s increasingly erratic reaction to the whole thing. By the time the rest of the crew does escape and get back to Moya, she’s in full-on breakdown mode, shoving D’Argo’s Qualta Blade halfway through a table and throwing herself on John, clinging and begging in a way that sounds half-deranged for him to use the wormhole weapon he now has access to and understands how to use to wreak vengeance on the people responsible for the death of her beloved.

Which leads to the mini climaxing in a gigantic game of chicken as John does activate the weapon, which turns out to be way, WAY more big of a deal than even the people seeing it as the ultimate weapon ever realized it was. It’s a reality-ending level nuke, and John essentially threatens to end the universe (at least, that’s the implication) if the war doesn’t immediately come to a halt and both sides don’t agree on a meaningful and lasting truce. That ironic moment where Scorpius tells John that what he’s just done is insane and John bursts into laughter before reminding everyone that this was what they were pushing him so hard to do just caps off the entire arc so well for me. Like John said, the weapon doesn’t even make war, it simply devours everything. Despite his claims to the contrary, though, the weapon does inevitably make peace in the way they were hoping, but not in the hands of the Peacekeepers, or the Scarrans. It’s in the hands of a bunch of fugitives on an otherwise weaponless living ship that the weapon could actually bring an end to the conflict.

I really like the ending. Yeah, it’s a bit cheesy and happy for Farscape, and everything seems to be wrapped up pretty neatly (with some threads left over to pull on for future mediums), but the final shot of baby D’Argo looking up into the stars is just gorgeous. And with everything John and Aeryn have been through, they’ve earned their happy ending.

I realize my write-up probably looks a little more whiney than praise-y, and I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t like the mini. I really, really did. I have nitpicky issues here and there with it, but overall I had a lot of fun watching it. Part of it is that Noel covered so much of the great stuff that I don’t want to echo too much of, so its been boiled down to my reactions on specific things.

I’m really bad at ending things like this. It’s been a hell of a ride (even though we went off the rails for a good two years at the end of it all), and it’s had some downs, but mostly I’ve loved the frell out of this series. It’s been awesome getting to share my thoughts on it here with everyone. Super thanks go out to Kevin for getting me into the series in the first place and then pulling me in to getting involved with the project, as well as Noel and Weston, who I had bunches of fun discussing things with and got to know better through this project. Thanks also to everyone who followed the project and hopefully were at least mildly entertained by the gibberish I spewed throughout (and who patiently waited for us to actually get off our butts and finish the damn thing already). It’s been fun, guys.

This is Tessa Jerz, somewhere in the universe.

]]>http://farscape.madeoffail.net/episodes/tessas-take-on-farscape-the-peacekeeper-wars/feed/5http://farscape.madeoffail.net/episodes/tessas-take-on-farscape-the-peacekeeper-wars/Noel’s take on Farscape: The Peacekeeper Warshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DeconstructingMoya/~3/-heDQBMQrzg/
http://farscape.madeoffail.net/episodes/noels-take-on-farscape-the-peacekeeper-wars/#commentsFri, 30 May 2014 17:12:26 +0000http://farscape.madeoffail.net/?p=2686“Once upon a time, there was a boy named John, and John was an astronaut. He lived in a faraway place called Earth, which is so far away, you’ve never heard of it.

“One day, when John was out doing astronaut things, a big blue wormhole gobbled him up and spat him out at the far end of the universe.

“Things were looking grim in Mudville, till our hero met an amazing living ship, made some nice new friends, and he hooked up with his dream girl. We could’ve lived happily ever after, but the Peacekeepers raped, chased, and tortured us for years on end.

“Then, two months ago, we got our asses shot off again. This time, it was the Scarrans – big reptiles, wooooo – and Moya, our living ship, limped her way to your happy planet for a little R&R. Because, we figure, it’s empty. Hey, no one is gonna bother us.

“Next thing, me and the future Mrs. Crichton are having a private moment, when you guys fly by, boom bada-bing, squiggly line squiggly line… Crystalized.

“And it’s two months later.”Hour 1

We open on a future scene, of John bloodied in a bed, not unlike the final moments of his twin. Lord, it’s been song long since I’ve last watched this mini-series that I don’t have the foggiest notion of what his fate has been, but the voiceover from Aeryn – starting peacefully, about how they’ve won, then breaking, backed by sadness about how she won’t accept losing him as a tradeoff – is kicking me in the soul for not remembering because oh sweet pretzels is it a haunting tease of an uncertain, bittersweet fate, echoing through the deserted halls of Moya.

And then we flash back, and it’s war, with Peacekeeper and Scarran fleets pummeling one another within a planet’s rings. And the first shot of the war? Fired by Scorpius, of course. High Command has made him admiral of a fleet! … Then sacrificed showed their trust in him by sending his fleet to the front lines on a “reconnaissance mission”. So what does he do? He pulls a Reinhard and initiates a full on war, so the guns are suddenly spread in every direction instead of all pointed at him.

And then he skips out and joins John. Because these two got along so well the last time they lived together on Moya, they just have to give it a second go, with Scorpius peeping John’s brain through Harvey, John using Scorpius as a human shield, and the word “loverboy” tossed around a few times. Oh, and there’s a funny bit where John erases Einstein’s formulas from a blackboard and replaces them with a “FUCK OFF” pointed squarely at his two Scorps. So things are back up and running between the galaxy’s most bestest frenemies.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. We still have the water planet, where, like Shelley Winters before him, Rygel proves to be quite the graceful swimmer as he picks up, swallows, and later vomits up the pieces of John and Aeryn that spilled over the boat when they were reduced to pebbles. Because, oops, not only did the locals mistakenly zap the heroes, but they did so on a craft narrow enough to allow our heroes to runneth over. But it’s okay! Because Grunchlk is back! And he has a new Diagnosan! Granted, this Diagnosan is a little more wino-y than the last, and Grunchlk is still Grunchlk, but our heroes are nonetheless reconstituted two months after they decorated the aquarium bottom, and the final piece that Rygel forgot to cough up turns out to have been Aeryn’s baby, meaning he’s pregnant.

Okay, so the split head people are actually the Eidelons, who tie back to the ancient temple where we left Jool, meaning a bit of backtracking is in store for our heroes as they try to help this culture find a bridge to their newly resurrected ancestors. Great plot, looking forward to where it goes, but it is a bit out of nowhere. It also speaks to the larger problem I’m already encountering in this first 45 minute chunk of the miniseries, in that this feels like they’re taking a season of a show and crunching it down into a Reader’s Digest format. Here’s the episodes I can see:

1) John and Aeryn come back. Tension with the water planet race. Revelation that Rygel is now pregnant with their baby.

2) War breaks out between the Peacekeepers and Scarrans, with Scorpius firing the first shot. Drama between Maryk and Grayza (she’s pregnant!). Drama between Scorpius and Sikozu (that hair!). Drama between Ahkna and Staleek (less tall of a hat, but still a creepy hat!). Scorpius and Sikozu abandon their post.

3) We find out the waterworld race are the Eidelons. Noranti exposition. Scorpius and Sikozu arrive. Headfrellery between John and Harve. Peacekeepers show up and heroes take off with Eidelons.

4) Everyone settling back into life on the ship, with continued tensions, and Eidelons wondering why everyone is so weird. Rygel gets the message from Hyneria.

As a series, these would played out well and we would have time to soak each one in. As they are, they feel rushed don’t always transition well from one to the other. I like the Eidelons, they have an interesting look and story, but we don’t get enough time for it to play out before “Oh, hey, we met your ancestors, so why don’t a few of you hop on board our ship and we’ll take them to you.” If this were playing out as a season, that would be fun to explore. For this miniseries, it feels like an extraneous distraction from what should be a tighter central focus on the war and the parts our characters play in it. Other than the Eidelons having to be there because they ended Season 4, they’re extra fat that could have been trimmed. Unless they do actually play a big part down the road, which I don’t remember. So we’ll see.

Also extraneous is the entire attack by the Tregan vessel. I mean, yeah, it gives us a few great sequences – John using Scorpius as a shield, D’Argo and Aeryn conversing between gunfire exchanges, Chiana and Sikozu completely kicking ass, Stark realizing he can best help by staying out of everyone’s way – but you could have just played these out against Peacekeepers while they’re escaping the planet. You don’t need this entire shoehorned in plot thread of a vessel manned by creatures we’ve never seen before and will never see again, the characters of whom have nothing to do with anything else that’s going on, when your time to tell your story is limited. The focus should have been narrowed, playing out the essential threads instead of every episode they had on the schedule. I mean, look how much story I listed up above. This isn’t even the first half of the mini, this is the first half of the first half of the mini. This is 270 minutes worth of story stuffed in a 45 minute bag.

My other issues are small ones, but worth saying. It’s no secret that the show has recycled actors from time to time, but they typically only do so when the performers are covered in prosthetics and otherwise unrecognizable. Here, we have Linal Haft and Sandy Gore, who both played previous roles with clearly visible faces, and are doing so once again. Gore, especially, creates a moment of confusion because her multi-episode appearance as the Scarran’s assistant was in the middle of the last season. Watching this show in order, that means less than a dozen episodes are between then and now, and while I think she’s a great actress, she’s also a very distinctive actress, and it was a mistake to stick her in two parts so chronologically close together.

There’s also some odd makeup moments. Scorpius’ skin looks painted on. Sikozu’s scales have been downplayed. Noranti looks fine in some shots, oddly puffy in others. I don’t think it’s a prosthetic problem, it’s in the makeup that was done over the prosthetic, as though it’s being done by an entirely new group of people working off of scattered notes from their predecessors. The tweaked costumes are great, though. No complaints there. Slicker, a little more stylish. And D’Argo and Chiana’s makeup looks fine.

But then there’s Pilot. What did they do to Pilot’s voice, because they’re suddenly processing Lani Tupu in a way that makes him sound completely different than he has in the entire series. Have they suddenly forgotten how it was done? Like the makeup, was it suddenly in different hands? Was it so hard to just call someone up and say, “Yo, what setting did you use.”?

Those issues aside, this is still a blast, as they key elements of character conflict are there, all of the actors bring their A-game, the music and effects are spectacular (minus the CGI Rygel, who was nicely animated, just crudely rendered), the action is wonderful, Grunchlk showing up again really made my day, and it has me amped for what comes next.

Hour 2

So everything I wrote above? Yeah, that was from two years ago when we initially started this project. Wanted to give a heads up just in case anyone realized my writing style is a little different now than it was then. Forgot just how quippy of a smartass I could be. When the above was written, I was also fresh off Season 4, so my memories of the show were clearer than they are now with a two year gap between things. I re-read our posts on Season 4, but if I’m overlooking connections, my apologies and feel free to fill me in with a comment below.

We’re back to Arnesk! Where we left Jool who, for some reason, is dressed as a Sheena-style jungle girl as she takes down John and then starts making out with him, until Aeryn glares her away. It’s a very unexpected way to re-introduce the character, and again speaks to the rushed nature of the show, as we don’t get to spend any further time with her aside from a few lines in crowd shots, and even Rygel is now going through what’s called a “geometric pregnancy”, meaning the child could be fully gestated and born in a matter of days.

Okay, I’ll give them that. Aside from this necessary bit of plotting and Jool being overlooked (as well as a third point I’ll get to in the next paragraph), this hour doesn’t feel as much like multiple episodes squished together as the last one did. There’s good progression and flow to the story as it narrows its focus on the key conflicts and sweeps, and I’m curious to see if it’ll maintain this footing for the next hour.

So on Arnesk, the Eidelons are hesitant to believe the news our heroes have brought them about a planet full of descendants, until John misfires his gun and goes into a rant about The Wizard of Oz. Which the Eidelons accept as they start training the bland kid whose name I don’t remember in the ways of channeling cosmic peace. Honestly, there’s not much to the Eidelons as characters. The bland kid could never stop smirking, so I’m glad we leave him behind here, and while Ron Haddrick is fine as Heirarch Yondalao, it’s a largely forgettable character. Which brings me to the third problem with the season compression as we never get to develop Yondalao beyond being a spiritual leader archetype, so when he dies at the end of this hour, it has little impact beyond just suddenly happening.

Not to get too far ahead of myself, the Scarrans show up in a massive battleship, blow up the Eidelon temple (exit: Jool), wreck Moya’s starburst drive before she can take off, and leave D’Argo and Chiana for dead adrift in space as the rest of our heroes are captured. Jool, shame she didn’t get more time for her return as the stark and distant explosion on the surface was a great shot I wish had more weight behind it. Anyways, our heroes are completely overwhelmed as Emperor Staleek and War Minister Ahkna know about the baby and use Rygel as leverage to force John to give them wormhole weapons. And Staleek rips the cooling unit out of Scorpius’ head for good measure, forcing Sikozu to jerry-rig him a nasty new one as we see Scorpius’ cranial innards slurping their way around fresh rods.

John can’t build wormhole weapons, so as proof, he somehow squeezes Staleek into the back seat of Farscape 1 (love how they cut away just before or after we’d actually have to see how he climbed in there), and takes him to Einstein at the end of the wormhole. This not only convinces Staleek John is of no use to him, but that wormhole weapons are a bad horrible awful idea which could tear the universe to shreds simply for existing.

So then they’re back to the ship, Staleek doesn’t know what to do, and Yondalao uses his powers to gently nudge Staleek down the path of seeking peace… until Ahkna fries the old man and our heroes are stuck in a room being flooded with gas so their brains can be dissected.

That’s about the gist of it. Other threads:

Chiana and D’Argo are rescued by Jothee, who commands a small strike ship of Luxans. Nice to see the kid back, but shame the destruction of Lo’la was brushed aside pretty quick as Jothee shows off how much more advanced his is. Also, there’s no reason Chiana should be alive. THAT’S NOT HOW THE VACUUM OF SPACE WORKS.

We learn the origin of Peacekeeper and how they may tie back to Humanity, as they’re evolved versions of a life on some fringe planet, engineered by the Eidelons to maintain the accorded peace of the cosmos. Nice line about how, without the Eidelons, they kept maintaining peace the only way they knew how: at the muzzle of a gun.

Sikozu is stuck wondering how relationships work as she tries to figure out if she or Scorpius is the superior one in the relationship, until Aeryn schools her with the idea of just being with who works for you regardless.

Interesting tension between Ahnka and Staleek as she often countermands his orders and operates behind his back, but out of dedication to his best interests. She’s so chilling.

Harvey is trying to talk John into killing himself, in the form of a Crash Test Dummy hallucination.

Stark now has the knowledge of Yondalao in his brain, which he needs to bring to the Eidelons. Great reaction as something he feels he’s beneath is forced into his soul by the others.

With the promise of peace, Grayza poisons her lover, Grand Chancellor Maryk, to death, as she’d rather see mutual eradication than share space with the Scarrans. Because of course.

Overall, a much better and more consistent hour than the first. It does have its rushed moments, but the focus is tighter, the central conflict ratchets up, and aside from a few exceptions, there’s some great character moments in there.

Hour 3

Our heroes escape the gas flooding into their cell thanks to Sikozu’s ingitability (despite igniting gas NOT WORKING THAT WAY), Scorpius melting through a grate with a spent cooling rod he rips from his head (!), and Jothee arriving with his commando squad of Luxans. Let me pause for a minute to say how awesome the commando squad of Luxans is. They don’t get much individual personality development (again, squished running time of the presentation), but as a whole, they really show why Luxans have made a name for themselves as warriors. I was a little let down when they flew off after the prison break, but as we gear up to the major battle in the second half, they’re suddenly repelling down a wall, back in the thick of things, and I was beaming.

I’ll admit the story does slow down a bit as the focus wanders to Stark going all Stark as he’s fighting with the forces in his head, and scenes like Chiana trying to feed him or everyone searching the flooding ship for him do drag on a bit. Especially when he finally releases the power and has no further repercussions from it to warrant the build. Again, spread out over a season, this could make for some fun episodes, but here, it feels like we’ve slipped our attention. It’s not a huge chunk of the story, so I can blow past it.

Other developments in this section: the baby is back in Aeryn as Rygel sobs through a post-pregnancy hormonal imbalance; D’Argo and Chiana decide to retire together on Hyneria; Jothee decides to stick with his father; and John confronts Einstein, fully unlocking wormhole knowledge in his brain and allowing him to make a wormhole weapon. Interesting complications arise from this, as the support he gets from Aeryn is balanced by the dread and resentment Pilot and Moya feel about being party to such a devastating weapon. And for John’s part, there’s a great speech about how he’s had a gun pointed at his head all this time, and he has to defend himself and his family, even if it means causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people so as to end a war which will kill billions. It puts us squarely in the ethical grey zone this series explores so well, and it’s good that I haven’t seen this in a while as I actually can’t remember how this plays out in the final hour.

But they still have a chance with the Eidelons, and head back to Arnesk. Unfortunately, both the Peacekeeper and Scarran armadas have found out about the Eidelons on Arnesk, and Moya runs right into the middle of a firefight between the two sides over the planet, leaving her shot full of holes and seeking refuge beneath the ocean of the planet’s surface. Great callback to the second episode.

So our heroes abandon the floodwaters of the ship as they head back to the main Eidelon city, which has been devastated by Scarran attacks, even as Braca and a contingent of Peacekeepers try to keep as many Eidelons alive as they can. So its these Peacekeepers, our heroes, the Luxan commandos, and oh look, Grunchlk and the Diagnosan are still around, as defense perimeters are set up and they try to defend what’s left of the city. Stark transfers his knowledge over to the lead Eidelon, who needs more of her population, who are all being lead around wreckage somewhere by Noranti. The heroes are trying to keep their status a secret, but Ahkna is getting info from a spy (gasp!) and is coordinating her troops around their position. Oh, and Aeryn’s water just broke and she’s giving birth. Which the Diagnosan is able to help with, until he takes a bullet through the skull, and now Chiana is working to turn the baby around, which would be much easier if Aeryn would stop shooting at everything.

So yeah, fun times ensue.

Some issues with pacing and focus aside, this miniseries is getting better by the hour, as we’re actually building all our threads and character arcs to a definite climax, and things are weaving together beautifully. John is also being pushed to one of his trademark breaking points, as he has a massive choice in front of him, and the universe just doesn’t seem willing to allow him to make the right one.

I’m all amped for the conclusion, so let’s wrap this up!

Hour 4

Hang on. I’m still dabbing away at my eyes with some sob-filled tissues after this stretch….

Okay, I’m go–OH GOD WHY….

….

….

Okay, I’m good.

So Sikozu is the traitor. Not a huge shock, and when Scorpius confronts her about it, it goes about as squickily as you’d imagine. Surprisingly, she survives the encounter, in a nice little moment where Grunchlk is also left behind alive. We never see how they get off the planet prior to events soon to be spoken of, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they showed up again in the comics.

As for Scorpius, the most fascinating thing about him in this final stretch is that he doesn’t pull a heel-turn. He doesn’t particularly get along with our heroes, but there’s never a surprise betrayal on his part as they work together up to the very end toward their shared goals. Building things to an ultimate confrontation between John and Scorpius would be the expected way for this ultimate finale to go, so I find it refreshing that it’s instead a path they share.

Aeryn gives birth in a great sequence of chaos, as John is there, Chiana is medicating herself with purloined liquor, Stark is trying to remember the right prayers to marry them, and Rygel vomits up John’s mother’s ring for the occasion. They really dance their way around how Aeryn manages the act without taking off her tight leather pants, but I’ll give them the happy moment. And I love how Aeryn asks John to promise to find a way out of this, he says, “Done,” and the next thing we see are all our heroes side by side as they blaze their way right through the opposition.

And then there’s an ambush and D’Argo is killed.

Say what you will about the structure of the miniseries leading up to this point, but from here on out, it’s one emotional punch after another, as the big guy says his farewells while coughing up black blood, Chiana has to be dragged away, Stark respects his wish to leave his soul be, and John has to say goodbye to the best bro he’s ever known. And then they put a pair of pulse rifles in his hands and leave him blasting away at the enemy shouting “I’M YOUR DADDY!!!” This is further punctuated by the great moments of Pilot and Moya learning of his death, and John being unable to break the news to Jothee.

So then we get to the wormhole weapon, as John learns Pilot had the DRDs build all the necessary components, and realizes it really has reached the point of this being the only option. Here’s the thing about Farscape: this has never been a story about heroes, never a story about peace. So while these are big themes conveyed to us by this mini-series, it gives them to us in a way packed with pain and guilt and tears about choices the characters are forced to make. And John, just before activating the big guns, knows this, and makes Scorpius beg him for it before pushing the button.

And we have our wormhole weapon, an exponentially increasing black hole which will ultimately consume the entire galaxy if left untouched. The Scarrans can’t break away. The Peacekeepers can’t break away. And Moya can’t break away. Everyone is pretty much doomed as they watch the planet below tear apart in the expanding rings of fire, destroying the only home ever known by the Eidelon populace needed to broker the necessary peace. It’s finally enough to shut everyone up and realize the consequences of four years of chasing around the cosmos a dude capable of absolute annihilation, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t destroy everything before letting his son be born into a war.

Peace is agreed to and he shuts the weapon down, just as Einstein yanks all the wormhole knowledge from his brain, leaving John in the coma we saw in the opening tag. He stares with unseeing eyes, never witnessing the Eidelon-brokered peace, nor Scorpius finally taking pleasure in the meeting of both his halves, nor Stark freeing himself of his mask and the madness in his soul, nor Jothee accepting the blade of his fallen father. But he does see the passing of Harvey, recreating the final moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey as the neural clone program completes its mission and begins deleting itself. And he comes to and rolls over, seeing his son resting at his side. And Aeryn is watching from the corner, and…

ALL THE TISSUES. ALL OF THEM.

I’ll admit the final scene is a little cheesy, as they doll up and present their son – of course named D’Argo – to the cosmos, but hell, they’ve earned it by this point. Whatever problems I had with the buildup of this miniseries, with their visible compression of season 5 and juggling of too many elements to give some of them enough focus to make them work, they ultimately nailed it in the end, and gave us an out where we could cheer for our heroes. In four season of hard choices and haunting consequences and the losing of multiple minds, they finally let us, the audience, find some peace as they waved us off, with so much left they wanted to share, but an understanding that their guarantee to do so was no longer there.

Yeah, about that… So not only did we have every intention of doing a Peacekeeper Wars piece soon after finishing season 4, but we actually started to write it. We ran into some conflicts over how it should be laid out and put a pin in it, and before we had a chance to start it up again, life happened. Marriages, breakups, moves, job changes, sired offspring, cats, new projects. Life kept giving us other stuff we needed to prioritize, so instead of bringing some closure to this long-running piece, we held off so long that we started to move on.

So here’s my promise.
I vow, by the end of next month (May, 2014), to do a full writeup of Peacekeeper Wars. Hell, I already started one way back when, just need to dust it off and finish it. I hope the others will have a chance to jot down their thoughts when they have the time to, but it’s been quite a while and everyone is in different places in their lives than they were two years ago, so don’t hold it against them if they can’t. But at least I can give you all something, some little bit of closure to wrap this delay up so we can say this thing we started has, to a degree, been finished.

Until then, I dug this tie-in out while recently moving and figured I should give it a writeup before it’s tucked back in storage again. Farscape: War Torn was a two-issue mini-series put out by WildStorm in 2002, with the main story being split among two 40-page installments, and a back-up spread among a pair of 8-page segments.

Let’s start with Warn Torn, broken in the halves “Rocks and Hard Places” and “Paradise Lost”.

Centuries ago, a voice echoed from the world of Tivira, telling people to come. It was heard by two races – the deeply spiritual Kylei and the proud warrior Garangee – both of whom believe it to be the voice of their respective god, calling them to settle on a blessed paradise. Both arrive at the same time and quickly reach a stalemate, settling on neighboring worlds while trying to work out a treaty which will allow them both to share the world. The Kylei have build their temporary planet into a lush forest focused on meditation and spiritual renewal. The Garangee have dug their world into an industrial complex which has quickly run down as the warrior race has found themselves without anyone to war with for generations.

Into this tense standoff blunders our heroes, as they’re looking to restock on food and fix an issue with Moya’s temperature regulation. This story is set near the end of season 1, after Chiana’s joined the crew and Scorpius has been introduced, but before the events of the two-part season finale.

John, Zhann, and Chiana head to the Kylei world where they find food in such abundance that the people freely part with it. Zhaan forges a deep connection to with the priests of the populace, and John’s spirit is briefly merged with that of the leader Tulahh, a beautiful woman saving him from an injury.

Aeryn, D’Argo, and Rygel head to the Garangee world to get the parts needed to fix Moya, and as Aeryn and D’Argo struggle to make the needed repairs, they’re struck by seeing how broken in spirits the once fellow proud race of warriors has fallen.

It’s not long before Kylei ships launch a sneak attack on Garangee, and Garangee ships launch a sneak attack on Kylei, and everyone is pointing fingers (even our heroes don’t know who to blame) while governments deny it’s their actions and the treaty is threatened. They eventually decide to go ahead with the signing, but even the neutral territory it takes place in is attacked, leaving leaders dead and open war declared.

As to what Chiana and Rygel have been up to this whole time… Rygel starts selling his services to both sides, giving both the same training and strategies which give neither an upper hand as he profits more and more from the escalation of the conflict. Chiana, while poking around looking for riches, stumbles across an underground alliance between both races, which have been attacking their own people in disguise so as to undo the treaty, as both sides feel Tivira can belong to only one.

There’s lot of great character moments as the war unfolds, with Rygel rolling in his greed until it gets out of control and leads to potential mutually assured destruction. Chiana trying to get the truth out less because it’s the right thing to do, more because she’s pissed at being chased with lasers on her tail. Aeryn and D’Argo, both of whom know war all too well, still being stunned by the depths of devastation unfolding around them. John holding a dying Tulahh in his arms, and trying to break the news to her daughter, Talalee, unaware the girl is the leader of the underground group who triggered this war. And Zhaan wailing in a field of burning gardens and slain priests, grabbing a weapon and roaring as she fires it into the ships passing by overhead.

As written by comic legend Marv Wolfman, this is a really damn solid storyline and, had they the budget to pull the war off on screen, would have made for a fantastic episode. It takes a totally stand-alone story and escalates it to point where it resonates on its own, then goes the extra step further of emotionally investing our characters (who are all perfectly written in character), so that we feel the resonance through how it affects them. This is skilled stuff and it’s a shame Wolfman wasn’t able to do any issues for the franchise beyond this.

The art, though, is a mixed bag. It’s lushly colored in all the oranges and blues of the show, but it has the problem a lot of heavily referenced, photo-realistic work in that, while many of the images are nicely crafted, they don’t always make for a good narrative flow across the page. And some stillframe expressions can come off looking silly at points where they’re trying to convey drama, or flat when trying to convey humor. It still works well enough, though, and Robert Taranishi (with inks by Keith Aiken and Al Gordon) does a nice job of giving both guest races distinct looks and distinct worlds. The action is a bit stiff, but this is largely a character piece, so those moments are few and far between.

And it all caps nicely at the end as we reveal the voice of the “god” who summoned them was really just a dead ship with a malfunctioning SOS emitter, that crashed on a rock thousands of years ago, and all of this fighting has been over a heap of rust on a world of dust. Which neither side accepts as they continue their war and the heroes get the hell out of there.

The back-up story “Fourth Horseman”, again written by Wolfman, follows Chiana as, while on layaway, she finds herself being pursued by Nebari mind-slavers. They’re actually after a contingent of the Nebari underground, led by Eadon, one of Chiana’s old lovers and best friend of her brother. They all get away, but what they don’t realize is they’ve all been infected with an STD with the hopes they’ll fuck their way through the cosmos, spreading a contagion that saps other races of will and makes them easier to conquer.

Chiana quickly figures this out, as she and her brother once dealt with the virus and she’s already been immunized with a cure. She falls for Eadon, there’s a spy, they set up a trap… and Chiana’s knocked out, watching from an escape pod as Eadon and the other infected Nebari kamikaze themselves into the space station where the contagion is being manufactured.

This is a story that really needed a lot more room and scope to work, as it rushes through a lot of information faster than it has a chance to stick, cheats by already giving Chiana a past and immunity to this virus, and ultimately lacks any weight because of how little time we get to spend with anyone. Which isn’t to say it’s bad, it’s just ultimately slight and unmoving.

I actually like the art better here than in the main story, though. Carlos Mota (again inked by Keith Aiken) has a very clean, flowing look reminiscent of Leonard Kirk (one of my favs!), and captures the likeness of Chiana well without feeling like it’s being traced. It moves along with great expression and energy, shame the story couldn’t keep up with it.

When the crew agrees to take on a well-paying passenger who wants to return home, he leads them to Liantic, the gambling mesa of the uncharted territories, where hotels and casinos wrap the entire world, and where Rygel goes too far in a game of cards, betting and losing Moya. Netoros, the local leading council member and ruler of that casino sector, offers them a chance to buy off their debt if they’ll stay around for a few days, offering up the services of Zhaan to identify plants in a fellow councilman’s treasured garden, D’Argo to play bodyguard to a lounge singer that’s received a few threats on his life, and John (already famed for his wormholes) to the labs to solve a little problem with their atmosphere.

Following an assassination attempt a few years back against a specific ship’s engine drive, the atmosphere is now clouded with particles that make it impossible for inorganic vessels to fly, which has been a huge blow to the planet’s economy. All Liantic has are crummy little organic ferry pods that have a bad habit of rapidly deteriorating and dying. Such as the one Moya intercepts just as it leads to the death of the Peacekeeper its carrying. A Peacekeeper striking a back alley deal with Netoros to give her the techno-organic ferry of Moya and overthrow the council in exchange for our heroes and opening up the planet to Peacekeeper “protection”. So, yeah, Rygel’s loss was rigged.

This is a solid setup. The world of Liantic is sprawling and rich, with its constant nickle-and-diming and copious advertising, the Big Bird-like Lians are fun to visualize with their various styles of head feathers, and the main cast is worked into things well and each given something to do (thankfully for Zhaan, given how overlooked she was in the last books). While the main three are doing their things (D’Argo snarling at the singer’s eccentricities, John wrapping up the atmosphere problem lickety split thanks to his knowledge of human exhaust systems, and Zhaan realizing she herself is intended to be featured in the councilman’s expansive garden) we get the added threads of Chiana hitting the town both for fun and to seduce info from people, Aeryn encountering an exiled and bitter Peacekeeper tech that she was responsible for getting kicked out, then has to slip back into her old role to impersonate the Peacekeeper envoy who winds up dead, Moya is trapped in the atmosphere with a Chlorium field that’s slowly numbing her the point where systems are shutting down, and Rygel just wants to hit the gambling tables some more in the hopes he’d be able to win back his freedom. Which everyone instantly says no to.

The first half of the book plays out just fine, with everyone staying in character as they gradually settle into this world and uncover the conspiracy winding through its underbelly. The world-building is great, the interplay fast and funny, showing Keith R.A. DeCandido has a great handle on their voices and personalities.

In the second half, it largely falls apart. Some threads are entirely dropped, with the Lian who brought them there in the first place suddenly never being mentioned again, leaving Chiana to head back to the ship and perform a clumsy funeral on Moya’s behalf for the fallen ferry. John has little in the way of a quest to solve the atmosphere problem, just instantly locking onto his module’s exhaust and calling it a day. D’Argo and Zhaan both wrap up their threads rather easily, then go to the press with the story, which suddenly yanks everything into a resolution, even interesting threads like Rygel wooing another council member or Aeryn struggling with her Peacekeeper persona, both of which seemed to be building to more than what they ultimately ended up being. And then there’s a planet-destroying bomb pulled completely out of Keith’s ass in the last 10 pages just so Aeryn can suddenly resolve her arc with the exiled tech, who was so underused for the majority of the book as to be largely forgotten by this point.

This book is fine, with a setup that fits the series and plays its character well, but it never escapes the disposable nature of tie-in novels – like Dark Side of the Sun mostly managed with its ambition and intensity – and it completely drops the ball in the second half, leaving an interesting build to fizzle with little in the way of a satisfying end.

]]>http://farscape.madeoffail.net/blogs/house-of-cards-a-farscape-novel/feed/4http://farscape.madeoffail.net/blogs/house-of-cards-a-farscape-novel/Dark Side of the Sun – A Farscape Novelhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DeconstructingMoya/~3/FgXGRTdK3x8/
http://farscape.madeoffail.net/blogs/dark-side-of-the-sun-a-farscape-novel/#commentsFri, 14 Sep 2012 13:42:46 +0000http://farscape.madeoffail.net/?p=2555This tale opens on Crichton’s toothache. Not being a fan of dentics, he hasn’t been keeping up with his oral hygiene, and his face stings with pain every time he does anything but keep it still. And even then, it aches. So Zhaan gives him a stronger dentic. Which takes one nibble on his tooth, then dies, leaving his mouth tasting even funkier than usual. So John tosses it in the recycler. Unfortunately, John didn’t know that YOU NEVER THROW A DENTIC IN THE RECYCLER, because Moya consumes that matter and John’s toothache bacteria has now blown up into a necrotic virus eating away at Moya’s muscle tissue and nervous system. If they don’t do anything about it, she’ll be dead in about a day. And even if she does survive, she’ll be severely crippled for life. All because John had a toothache.

So they go for the closest help they can find, a floating pirate city assembled from inter-docked black market trade crafts, hidden near the corona of a dying sun. The place is run by Jansz, a being mentally interlocked with a community of assorted dealers who all act as his eyes and ears within the city. John figures this means Jansz is a tiny being, all brains, no brawn. In reality, Janz is a massive, clawed, bearlike coil of muscle with not one, not two, but three mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth. But at least he’s a polite bundle of killer physique and mental abilities, provided the trade the crew offers is enough to barter the stem cell grafts for Moya’s wounds, which one of his ships excels in.

And leave it to Rygel to screw things up. Why? Because he comes across a slave girl in a golden bikini – a Hynerian slave girl in a bikini – and recognizes her as Nyaella, the love of his life, who he was forced by his father to abandon so he could enter political marriages as part of his grooming to be Dominar. He never stopped loving her, though, but his attempt to free her goes bad and Jansz ups his price. He wants Chiana. Since this was from late in season 1, Chiana still has her doubts about the rest of the crew and sees a chance for wealth and action, so she agrees. Then Rygel actually succeeds in breaking Nyaella free, leading to John and Aeryn being captured, so Chiana, as part of her initiation, is ordered to shoot John (she does), then watch as Aeryn fights to the death with a scorpion being who leaves her poisoned with a lethal toxin.

I went waaaaay beyond the setup there, but I just wanted you to get a nice taste of this story, and tell me that doesn’t sound like it would make for a great Farscape episode. All the trust John’s earned up until this point is tossed aside when he does the stupid human thing and brushes his teeth in a way that leaves Moya hopelessly infected with leprosy. Rygel becomes the dashing (if you give him a second to catch his breath) adventure hero, finally able to reclaim the life and love he was forced by familial obligation to abandon, as he and his bikini-clad bride-who-once-was flee and con their way through a pirate city, at one point escaping multiple gangs of goons by triking them into taking each other out. John and Aeryn get to make out in the heavens with a dual dogfight before both are captured and Chiana is forced to make some tough choices she instantly regrets, leaving John on life support and Aeryn losing the fight against the poison in her blood.

And it all culminates with a massive action sequence as everybody has guns pointing at everyone else, Aeryn goes on a brutal last mission to get John out alive because, dammit, if she’s going to die, she’d not going to let him join along, and Chiana tries like hell to make everything right again. Oh, and the sun starts going supernova. And oh a Peacekeeper Armada shows up and starts shooting everything. So, yeah, great setup, some great action bits, and one hell of a climax. Andrew Dymond’s prose is what some might call purplish, but there’s a vividness to it that really juices up the action and gives the characters a pulpy spark that captures the show.

Where it didn’t work so much are the flashbacks. And there are a lot of flashbacks. Every single one of the leads gets to dwell on their past and how it somehow reflects what they’re going through now. Sometimes this works, like Aeryn focusing on the hardships of her training to push through her own impending death, or Rygel and his past with Nyaella, where we learn about the honorable man he lost the opportunity to be. Other times, it just drags, like John pondering his dad, or Zhaan and D’Argo pondering the murders that led to their imprisonment. Oh, I haven’t mentioned Zhaan and D’Argo yet, mainly because they don’t do much of anything. D’Argo stands around, then spends half the story unconscious. Zhaan uses her abilities to try and comfort Moya, then also spends half the story unconscious. Because I guess there wasn’t enough action filling the massive climax to slip D’Argo into it in any way? And why couldn’t Zhaan have been the key influence that turned Re into helping the ship?

Ah, Re. The biggest flaw of the book.

Re is a collective hive mind of small aquatic organism, centered around the first member of their species to have created a religion. There was war between their kind and many were wiped out, but all that remain are now for and of Re. Unfortunately, they’re on a water moon about to be swallowed up by the dying sun. So they reach out. There’s a prologue bit, but they otherwise sit out the majority of the story until they set up some kind of deal with Jansz, but then reneg when they instead latch onto the dying Moya and, for some reason, sacrifice themselves to swarm all over the dying craft and fix everything that’s broken. We knew Moya had to be cured by some point, but this is beyond convenient, especially given how late Re came into things and how it took very little convincing for it to decide to do so.

This is a good book. If you’re a Farscape fan, absolutely track it down. The characterizations are great and the story reads like something straight out of the show. Just be prepare to slog through a dozen too many flashback sequences, and the eyerolls induced by Re. But if you can get through all that, I think you’ll have a fun time.

“My voice… ahhhhhhhh… they won’t obey my voice?” cried Rygel. “It’s… oooooooh… a voice that has commanded billions! If I can’t use my voice, I can’t use the furze!”

Pilot looked quizzical. “I do not understand that term, Rygel.”

“The furze, the furze… that’s the device that stimulates the rudimentary glandpod at the base of the herpian suplex in the sphirochetia lobe of my brain! Ooooooooooh… stop… oh… That’s why I can talk to them…” Rygel shook with painful laughter.

There was dead silence from Pilot, then with low and sincere tones, he commanded the former ruler, “Use the furze, Rygel!”

Noel

Sorry for the stretch of zero updates that was the last couple of months, loyal followers. We started work on our big finale – which includes Peacekeeper Wars – but were forced to scrap it and weren’t able to get things rolling again before we had to take a break for Kevin’s wedding (congrats the lucky man, folks). We’ll be getting back on track with the finale this month, so keep your feed peeled in the coming weeks, and in the meantime, I’ve decided to take a three-part look at the Farscape tie-in novels published by Tor during the show’s original airing.

Ship of Ghosts introduces us to the Nokmadi, a now fabled race of beings who, centuries ago, set out to map as much of the cosmos they could. Operating out of a massive ship built from organic plant fibres, they eventually developed a technique to leave their bodies behind and take on an immortal non-corporeal state. They preserved organic samples of their entire race so they can reassemble their bodies and once again feel the sensations of a physical existence upon returning to their homeworld, but upon completing their mission, one of their member rejected the idea of giving up immortality for what she saw as a backward step in existential progression. So she destroyed her own physical samples and built a cult of followers who want to wipe out all physical samples, condemning their entire race to an eternal quest throughout the heavens. This splits the Nokmadi between the Dayfolk and the Nightfolk, that both long for a physical being, the Promised One, to enter the physical sample chamber and settle things one way or the other.
Lo and behold, the Promised One is John Crichton.

All of that story I just related to you? Almost none of it comes into play until the last 100 pages or so of this 277 page novel. First Moya encounters the massive vessel, which is dead in the water following the collapse of its space drive engines. Then our heroes board and come across Mary Celeste imagery of tables abandoned with their meals still on them. Then John follows up his citation of the Mary Celeste by going on for a page about the story of the Mary Celeste and how he was a fan of the Mary Celeste and even built a model of the Mary Celeste and drew his own artist’s interpretation of the deck of the Mary Celeste and hey wouldn’t you know it this looks almost exactly like that Mary Celeste, right down to the Terran furniture and meatloaf and – (takes a deep breath). Then John gets eaten by a wall, and both he and D’Argo & Aeryn encounter ghostly beings, and there’s people we don’t know talking cryptically about things we have no context for, and after about 150 pages of this drawn out boredom, I was about ready to step outside, walk a block, and pitch this book into a lake.

So in their noncorporeal forms, the Nokmadi have the ability to create physical manifestations of anything they or our heroes can conjure. Food, dwellings, a version of Zhaan with pink skin and hair for John to have sex with… if you can imagine it, the Nokmadi can make it appear as if it’s really there. Whether they’re really making reality out of unreality or merely affecting the perceptions of the physical beings in their midst is never explained, but hey, John and a human Zhaan hook up, so that’s something! *facepalm*

To be fair, the Nokmadi setup is interesting. There’s a scale and a history to it that is captivating, and their central struggle, which has escalated to the point where people will not only except but demand everyone be either ghosts or physical, is good. The problem lies in the boring execution. Not only does it take forever to actually tell us what’s going on, but the moment they do, you know exactly which way the tide is going to turn and who’s going to come out a hero. One of the main points of Farscape, even in Season 1, is to subvert expectations and formulas, so a formulaic story like this holds no water. Of course John is going to wrestle control back over his possessed body. Of course Rygel’s army of DRDs (more on that later) is going to come to the rescue. Of course our heroes get the two sides to sit down and agree that those who want to be ghosts get to be ghosts as long as they respect that those who want to be physical get to be physical. Of course there will be a last minute twist at the end that guarantees our heroes don’t get their hands on the promised star charts that will lead them home, because this is a one-off tie-in and can IN NO WAY alter the course of continuity, especially given its setting in the first half of Season 1.

The big problem with the majority of tie-in fiction written while a show is still in production is the utter pointlessness of it. As I pointed out in the end of the above paragraph, there are absolutely no allowances to muck about with things. These have to be, by the very fact the novelists have no control over the development of the show and very often little interaction, stand-alone stories that wrap up as they begin and don’t upset the status quo. Thus, the most important thing is to make sure that stand-alone story and stand-alone characters are interesting enough to largely carry things on their own. Here, they aren’t. The Nokmadi make for a neat setup, but very little of it is fleshed out, with very few named characters, one bland hero, and one stereotypical villain who yells “Heretics!” a lot. And as I said, it’s formulaic. Even this internal story, separate from Farscape, has nothing to add or captivate with beyond some neat ideas. The central conflict is barely even witnessed, instead largely related to us through exposition.

How does it handle the leads? Poorly. Now, I’ve seen a lot of reviews say the portrayals here are very out of character. They aren’t. This takes place early in Season 1 – probably just after “PK Tech Girl” since Durka is mentioned – and things do line up with how these characters were at that point. Rygel’s a pompous ass, D’Argo’s an agry ass, Aeryn’s a bitter ass, John’s a confused ass, and Zhaan is very motherly. While their dialogue doesn’t exactly roll to the mental sound of their voices, it’s hardly a misportrayal of the bunch. With the exception of Pilot, who’s very snide and constantly barking at Rygel, something the still cautious Pilot never would have done that early in the show. That all said, there’s absolutely nothing tying these characters to this plot. The Nokmadi are something that could have shown up in a Star Trek or Stargate SG-1 novel with the only altered words of their arcs being the names of the specific people interacting with them. And there’s also very little for ours heroes to do that gives them individual depth. John gets dragged around and possessed, then regains control. Zhaan mind melds with Moya, then this ship, then John. D’Argo and Aeryn go on a random warrior’s quest that comes out of the blue in the second half, flying a dragon and fighting shadow demon things in a sequence that’s every bit as much unnecessary padding as half the book.

The only one with something fun to do is Rygel, and that’s entirely because of a conceit. That conceit is that he’s found a little bluetooth device that gives him ultimate control over the DRDs, who he proceeds to lord over as if they were the subjects of his overthrown realm. These bits are fun, especially when Moya/Pilot get on his case for distracting the DRDs from essential operations, but even it falls apart when he cures a broken DRD through the laying on of hands, thus starting a religion that inexplicably carries over to the Nokmadi, and he and Pilot start using Terran terms like Conga-lines or a play on “Use the force!” without any prodding whatsoever from John. Which. Should. Not. Happen.

And just because this book needed something else going on, there’s a Peacekeeper plot! The book opens with Moya being attacked by a crazed onslaught from Crais and, just as she Starbursts away, a Peacekeeper cutter craft manages to be in the right place at the right time so as to be dragged along in the warp wake. The cutter is Captained by Sha Sutt, a former friend of Aeryn Sun who’s since turned bitter rival following a mission under Aeryn’s command where Sha lost a leg. So there’s a robo-legged Peacekeeper on our heroes’ tails and… she does nothing for most the book. Seriously, other than popping up on her command deck every 50 pages or so just to remind us she’s there, Sha Sutt spends the majority of the story doing nothing, and NEVER ONCE intersects with and affects the Nokmadi plot. And once that main plot is resolved, then she shows up for a skirmish and final showdown with Aeryn that lasts all of 15 pages. There is, however, a cool bit where she looses her bionic leg – which is actually a bomb (DRAMATIC STING) which is very quickly defused (DEFLATING SOUND) – only for a backup leg, a spindly spider thing, to fold out in its place as she runs away. She’s still out there, likely so Bischoff could bring her back in a potential future volume, but I don’t care.

Ah, yes, Bischoff, the man of the hour who I haven’t mentioned yet. He was a big figure in tie-in work, having penned a bunch of novelizations and spin-off books through the 80s and 90s. While I have read a few of his novelizations (The Blob, WarGames, and Some Kind of Wonderful, all of which are very nice), this is the first of his spinoff novels I’ve read, and I’m not impressed. My girlfriend Ceci also recently read the first of his Space Precinct tie-in novels and voiced many similar complaints, so I can’t say as I’ll be tracking down more Bischoff tie-ins in the near future.

Another word of note, some may be wondering why I’m reviewing this book first when it was actually the third to be published. Well, not only is it chronologically the earliest, but I have a strong suspicion it was written much earlier than when it came out. While the publication date is from near the start of Season 4, tie-in books can often face strange delays in both their writing and editing, and much of the way the characters read has the hallmark of it being done with only a limited amount of resources from which to draw. We saw this with Star Trek: The Next Generation, where the first few tie-in books – written when nothing had yet been filmed and only a series bible and a few scripts were available to draw inspiration from – had portrayals of the characters that differ significantly from how they’d quickly become even early on in Season 1. Throughout Farscape, John has always looked to his father Jack as a beloved rock that’s kept him focused in his journey home, but here John is portrayed as having a sense of bitterness toward his father, who he saw as neglectful and choosing the stars over his own son. In the show, space was what connected the two. Here, it’s what came between them. Thus, I suspect Bischoff didn’t have those portrayals to draw on when wrote what he did here. Anybody out there know otherwise? David? Editor Greg Cox? Feel free to chime in.

So, yeah, this is a completely disposable book. It takes too long to get to the story it wants to tell, doesn’t do much with the story once it gets there, doesn’t do a whole lot of anything of consequence or distinction with the main cast, and overall feels padded and drawn out. It’s an empty piece of tie-in entertainment and I can’t recommend it.

“You tell my grandkids about me.”
“Ha, that’s a no-brainer. They’ve got to know who my hero is.”
“You’re going to find when you have your own, you want them to surpass you. Be better. Climb higher. I guess if that’s the measure, I’m the greatest dad on Earth.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“You’re the heart and soul of my life, son. I love you.”
“Goodbye.”

The Scarrans are heading for Earth. The Peacekeepers want Scorpius back. And through it all, Crichton must make two decisions, both of which will alter his life irrevocably…

Kevin

To Be Continued.

It’s a phrase that has dual-meaning for Farscape fans, both due to the Save Farscape Campaign and its surprising result. I say “surprising” because in this industry, as Joss Whedon carefully points out in the pre-movie presentation for Serenity, it’s treated as understood and a general rule that cancelled shows do not get picked back up again, nor do they spawn major motion pictures or a high-budget miniseries. The best a series had ever done before was a spin-off nearly twenty years later. Now, of course, you see shows get cancelled and then picked back up through its massive success in syndication, more commonly being taken over by a cable network.

We had to wait two years for a resolution. Thankfully, all of you only have to wait three weeks for us to get to it, but more on that at the end of this post, because I’m not going to talk about cancellation, I’m here to talk about heroes.

We all get a chance to be our own kind of hero. Sometimes it involves walking on the moon and clipping a family photo onto the flag at Serenity Base. Sometimes it involves destroying your only chance to ever return so that an invading armada won’t occupy, slaughter, and enslave your family and destroy what little you have of your home.

For all that we’ve debated on the “Suddenly New Aspect Of Wormholes That We Just Learned” topic – and I’ll finally concede to Noel on the Jiffy-Pop wormhole sealant deal (available now for only three easy payments of $9999.99!) – the fact of the matter is that it’s been there. It was there for however long before Crichton originally discovered it, and he always assumed it would be there in case he maybe one day decided to go back home. It’s a conflict he’s been dealing with for a while, but the wormhole has always been intended to be a safety net. He may not have decided to use it, but it was there just in case.

Sealing off the wormhole (and giving Earth a warning) results in multiple objectives. First, unless another wormhole to a nearby system is discovered, Crichton will never go back to Earth again. Scorpius had calculated Earth’s distance at about 60 years travel at fastest speeds, and humans just don’t live that long. Crichton’s about 33 now, and even if he does lives to 93, his life is in deep space now.

Secondly, it protects Earth from Scarran invasion. If the Scarrans are still intent on seizing Earth for its potential Flower Power, they’ll have to travel 60 years to get there. In the meantime, there’s still the Peacekeeper border, and its holdings on Charrid and Kalish and however many other species’ territories, and splitting off a task force would cripple them.

Finally, it gives Earth a chance to finally come together and join the rest of the galaxy. It might take them sixty years to do so, but that’s sixty years of human ingenuity coupled with the technology, schematics, and political information that Crichton left for them on the moon, and you’d better damn well believe that they started putting a shuttle crew together the moment Jack got off the phone. That’s not even mentioning the fact that even if the Scarrans made the 60-year trip to Earth, that Earth would be ready and waiting for them.

You know what’s scarier than John Crichton? Seven billion John Crichtons.

Notes!

One of the reasons that D’Argo’s so upset is that Crichton and Aeryn have never fallen apart on him before.

He’s never seen them go to pieces before.

They’re all really broken up about it.

His illusions of them are just absolutely shattered ow ow Tessa stop ow ow frell it

I guess this neatly avoids the “What is Stark’s opinion of having to share a ship with Scorpius” question.

Did they re-use the “Did you say it like that ’cause now he knows” clips, or did they just shoot it again as a callback? I couldn’t tell.

If I really wanted to, I could sit back and come up with an explanation as to why the transport pod and the Scarran assault ship passed through each other harmlessly, but it was a bit strange. Really cool and a nice callback to Lo’La vaporizing the rogue Leviathan, but still strange.

Crichton reciting what might have been the fifth season’s credit sequence was a surreal touch, and I definitely applaud its inclusion.

Noel

Just to get it out of the way up front, I find it very amusing that Kevin finally concedes on the inconsistencies of wormholes over an aspect that I don’t really have much issue with. My problems earlier were contradictions. It was set up as a mapped network, something anyone could learn to navigate to get to specific exits within the network, but then they said that a pilot’s willpower steers the outcome and can literally let them out anywhere they want, just as long as they’re careful on the when. They make it safe for John and his module, but then there’s a stretch of people dissolving into goop with no plausible explanation. And then there’s the whole unrealized realities mess that I won’t go into again except to say that I didn’t like it one bit. I took issue with those purely from a narrative standpoint in that they had little, if anything, to do with what had already been established, and often contradicted what we already knew. Here, though, I don’t have an issue. How do you collapse a wormhole? Pulling the entrance back in on itself before it has a chance to open all the way. That makes perfect sense to me, as does requiring someone with a higher range of perception – like Pilot, which brings up a messy situation that plays out beautifully – to be the one who gets it done properly. I’m good with that!

What does bother me is that this is now treated as a single tunnel between points as opposed to a pair of doors in the hallway of the wormhole network, and how this should either take down the entire network once and for all (with untold consequences throughout the universe) or just sever the entrance above Earth, leaving the other end of the wormhole active and open to the network, just with one less possible exit to head out through. That bugs me, but it’s small enough that I’ll go with it. Especially because of the absolutely gorgeous bit that is the transport pod, fully charged with and leading a wall of collapsing wormhole energy, passing through the Scarran ship, whose captain is making his final report to both his Emperor and lover before he ceases to be. I’ll handwavium the question of how because of the swirling mass of time and space that the pod is still enveloped in.

Onto the broader episode, I think I’m finally starting to appreciate just how big of a blow this conclusion was to Farscape fandom. Back when I first watched the series on DVD, The Peacekeeper Wars had already been announced, so I knew I wasn’t going to be left on a fully unresolved cliffhanger. It also didn’t help that I didn’t really like Season 4 all that much, even less than I’ve been enjoying it now. I didn’t get into Sikozu or Noranti back then, and a lot of the plot left me feeling lost and confused. I actually think watching it in a weekly format here, with discussion and reflection, has made me appreciate it much more, plus I’ve lost all taste for marathoning shows that are meant to have a bit of space between installments.

The big thing that makes me get it is Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. There was another show which, especially in its last season, was equal parts frustrating and fascinating, that bounced me from being pissed to being absolutely gripped as I watched it from week to week. And then came the finale. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, without spoiling anything, let me just say that it was very similar to what we have here, with a huge escalation to a massive conflict between all the faction at play, the heroes making their big last stand and seeming to be in the clear – with relationships coming to a head and big damn hero moments leaving their iconic mark – and then we got to the last few minutes. In that final scene, they threw everyone for such a loop that it was hard to even process what all was going on as those minutes played out on the tv screen. Some were royally pissed. Some were thrilled and eager for the next chapter. Some were a combination of the two. And then came the cancellation. The ratings were bad, so we knew it was coming, but they left us on such a wildly bold cliffhanger that we clung to all our hopes that something more would come of this story. But it never did. Unlike Farscape, where creator Rockne S. O’Bannon wrote an epilogue in the final issue of the show’s official magazine (parts of which were later contradicted by The Peacekeeper Wars), T:SCC and its creators left us with nothing in the way of closure and the characters of that tale are still hanging from that cliff. Likely for all eternity.

So I get it now. I understand just how crushing of a blow it was for viewers to see John and Aeryn, in the midst of their happiest moment, reduced to bejewels, and how the hunger for a resolution would drive the fans to fight for this thing they loved.

And it doesn’t hurt that the episode leading up to that finale is a damn good one. In the preceding three-parter, we already had the huge conflict where a direct blow was struck to the villains, so a direct confrontation would be a bit redundant now. There’s no final showdown with Scorpius, with Grayza, with the Scarrans. No, instead it’s a race to beat them to the second most thing John holds dear: Earth. It’s long lingered in the background as John’s destination, then Scorpius hijacked it as a threat, then we actually got there and enforce the notion that They Are Not Ready for what lies in wait in the universe just outside their view. So now John has to make the latest in a string of tough choices as he chooses to seal off the easy route and once again make his home world the distant – but not entirely unattainable – goal. Though not before leaving behind some knowledge that’ll push humankind forward and help them be a little readier, as well as sharing a final farewell with his dad.

We haven’t given Kent McCord enough credit for his role as Jack Crichton, the hero of our hero, whose own actions and experiences seem small in the shadow of those of his son, but who is no less inspiring for what he’s accomplished. Jack’s screen time on the show would likely only fill a single episode, but McCord always cut a proud, determined, steady figure, and you could always see the man John held up as an idol and a goal. Through his recordings, you also see that John looks as Jack as a human he can trust to both understand and appreciate what his son has been through, and while they had their disagreements when they finally came face to face, that understanding was eventually reached, and you know it left Jack as a powerful ally who wouldn’t sit back and watch his planet dick around with the gifts his son brought. McCord absolutely knocks it out of the park in this episode as Jack and John share what may likely be their final farewell, with Jack showing that his son has now elevated to the biggest hero he’s ever seen, which makes him all the more heroic in John’s eyes because the man can still look forward and dream whereas John has been through horrors the other will never know. And they leave it on the note that Jack will come. One day, even if John doesn’t make it back, Jack will damn well make sure his people rise and take flight and start spreading across the stars. Even if Jack himself never makes it out to his son, the descendants of his actions will, and maybe they’ll reach the descendants of John, connecting the divide he opens up this day. There’s sadness, but there’s also great hope. And the smudged soul that is the world-weary John Crichton polishes itself off several scenes later as he re-enters the mindset of an eager country boy about to reach for the clouds for the first time. They’re having a baby. She said yes. Of all the things John has experienced, none fill him with the joy and excitement those two bring.

And then a random alien shows up, opens his face, and reduces the couple to pebbles while D’Argo collapses into primal, roaring sobs, unable to describe the tragedy he just witnessed to the blind Chiana.

To be continued, indeed.

Weston

My name is Weston Abney, a pizza delivery guy. Eleven years ago, I watched a guy get shot through a wormhole, with a group of dorm rats who became my friends. Now I’m rewatching that series with new friends, and learning so many things that I missed the first time around. Apparently nineteen-year-olds are terrible at catching subtext – who knew.

Nine years ago, I was watching this episode with those three friends. We knew that the series had been cancelled seven months previous, mere days before the end of shooting on season four; that this was the last hurrah for a show that defied every trope established by Star Trek and the like. Crichton’s final chance to pull off a ridiculous plan and save the day.

We didn’t appreciate the nested flashbacks in the introduction for the expository technique it was. Young and dumb, I got completely lost at the flash forward. I love it now, but I hated it fiercely at the time. Likely just transference from my rage at the cancellation.

Crichton’s trick with the “Dear John” bomb was clever, though it begs the question: How many of those things does he have? Did he whip up that nuke on the fly? Does he have more assembled? Did he just throw together the shell to bluff Braca while Moya made her getaway? We don’t know.

We also don’t know how Moya can now direct her Starbursts. Previously, they took her a random distance on a random vector in one-dimensional space – now she can use it as a faster-than-faster-than-light travel method. Even better, she can now EXTEND the Starburst, spending more time in the trans-dimensional space to traverse even more territory. When/where/how did she figure this out? Unknown. All we get is that Moya now has transwarp drive.

Oh yes. I went there.

They cut Pilot out of Moya. Remember what happened the last time they did that? Pilot is slowly dying until he’s hooked back into Moya, and even then it’s going to be a cycle or more until they’re fully healed. And hey, remember the last time Moya jumped down a wormhole to Earth? She doesn’t. Somehow she conquered her wormhole phobia that time, but this time, with the fate of six billion people at stake, she absolutely refuses. Or, how about Scorpy’s plan to destabilize the mouth of the wormhole by detonating a pair of transport pods inside it? Apparently insufficiently reliable for Crichton’s liking.

Rrrrrrg. The season got off to a slow start because SciFi wanted a reintroduction to all the characters and less continuity with the previous seasons in order to bring new viewers into the series. Unfortunate that the network gets its wish in the final episode of the series.

All that aside? Ignoring the technical quibbles and lore issues? It’s a good episode. Conflict and brainstorming, intuition and escalation, a solution that introduces new problems, and a sacrifice that resolves the hero’s dilemma. Beautiful storytelling. Not sure how the wormhole inversion thing works, and not sure why the head-on collision with the Stryker didn’t require a call to 911 and various insurance agencies, but it works.

…and then Moya’s floating in an ocean (what.) and Crichton found a rowboat somewhere (what?!) and oh hey here’s a new bad guy whose face splits open and he OBLITERATES Crichton and Aeryn RIGHT after they get engaged (WHAT?!) and they close out the series – THE FINAL EPISODE OF THE CANCELLED SERIES – with a TO BE CONTINUED.

TYI*P%$EI^IYTFTPL%EIYT(*&YI:JK[BN[LY(^%IYfrick.

Seasons four and five had been simultaneously greenlit by the SciFi network. Four was intended to set up plotlines that five would then knock down. The cliffhanger for season four was originally intended to close out season three, but The Powers That Be decided to push that back because, at the time, they weren’t sure that Farscape would be picked up for another season. They didn’t want to end the series on such a depressing note.

Oops.

The cancellation came as a surprise to everyone. It was announced by David Kemper and Ben Browder during a live internet chat with fans – few of the cast and crew knew of it before that. Lani Tupu found out from some fans in California who wanted to know how he felt about it. It kicked off the “Save Farscape” campaign, one of the first if not the first internet-based effort to uncancel a series. Television ads were filmed and placed. Boxes of crackers were mailed to executives. The internet exploded.

It didn’t quite work. Season five never came to be, but fourteen months later a miniseries was announced and produced. Ironically, it aired on SciFi. We’ll review that in another couple weeks – I have strong opinions about it.

I have to point out that at roughly the same time of the Farscape cancellation in 2002, another science fiction series started up on Fox. Really neat space western by the guy who did Buffy and Angel. Despite time slot problems and episodes aired out of order, it was pretty fantastic.

…wow, that really hasn’t sunk in yet, especially with the “end on a cliffhanger” dealie. I don’t think it’s possible for me to have anywhere near as emotionally strong a reaction as the others about this final episode, considering both that I’ve come to this series so late, and I already know in advance that there’s a miniseries all set up to watch to continue the story. It kind of blows my mind to think that first-run watchers had to wait three years to get any kind of resolution to what happens in this episode.

This is a good final episode, all things considered. The climax of the season has already played out over the last few episodes, and here we see the consequences on all sides of the actions our heroes took on Katratzi. As mentioned before, John kind of inadvertently painted a big bulls-eye on Earth for the Scarrans with the mention of the flowers, and having removed a large source of their brain food, the Scarrans of course set out immediately to take his home as a replacement.

The only real reason this becomes a decent set up for a single episode instead of something like a full season arc is that they pull another wormhole cheat and we’re back to the idea that they’re straight shots between two points again that anyone can navigate now that it’s necessary to the plot. There’s nothing really new here for me to complain about, so I won’t dwell on it, but the inconsistencies on wormholes as a plot device is easily my biggest pet peeve this season.

I actually don’t feel that strongly either way about the “inverting the wormhole” idea. Yeah, it’s another example of John reaching into his magical bag of tricks the Ancients stuck into his brain that comes out of nowhere (at the very least, though, it’s not something he’s actually able to pull off himself in the end), and I don’t know if it totally meshes with other explanations of how wormholes are actually supposed to work, but with the version of wormholes they’re going with in this episode, it works well enough.

I can really easily handwave the problems with the plot point away in favor of what it effectively does from a storytelling perspective. In the course of hours, John has to effectively undo the work he’s done over the course of the entire series. Arguably, up until this season, getting home to Earth has been his main goal. It’s the reason he started studying wormholes in the first place, and as a result, indirectly the reason why he’s been thrown headfirst into the Scarran/Peacekeeper conflict. All he wanted was the find a way home. And now he has to cut off what may well be the only way he could realistically return to Earth (at least, that’s how the development is treated). In that context, the final conversation he has with his father is heartbreaking. This could very well be the last time he ever speaks to his father.

I kind of like that the story most definitely doesn’t end here. The Scarrans couldn’t take the back door to Earth, but there’s still the long way, and the payoff for them taking Earth is far too big to let a 60 year journey be the thing that dissuades them. Even if there wasn’t a miniseries following all this, there’s a ton to build off of as a jumping point to imagine where everything would go from there. In addition to all that, the Scarrans would still need to work out exactly where Earth actually is and how to get there, while the Peacekeepers actually have access to that tidbit already through Scorpius, who is back with them again.

Okay, so, that ending. I’ve mentioned before (or rather, I mentioned to Kevin who in turn mentioned that I mentioned it here) that I think it would be extremely interesting for the show to actually kill off its main character. They toyed with that idea last season (which led to an episode that probably would have been one of my favorites if it didn’t involve a bug-faced man), but it was ultimately a pretty safe move since there was still a John Crichton around when all was said and done.

Here, at the last possible second, John and Aeryn finally seem to have things turning out for the better, and are sharing a lighthearted, slightly whimsical and goofy scene (at least once you bring in the observations of the rest of the crew), when suddenly an alien that as far as we can tell is completely unrelated to anything else we’ve been dealing with swoops in and disintegrates the two of them for what appears to be a total misunderstanding. That’s… a hell of a way to end of the series.

I don’t know anything about what’s coming in The Peacekeeper Wars. I don’t know what will be addressed, who will still be around, who will be introduced, or anything else about it. I will say that part of me actually hopes that what we witnessed at the end of this episode was the deaths of John and Aeryn. Not because I want either character to die, but more because I’d be fascinated to see how the story would unfold in their absence, and how the other characters would react and ultimately pick up and carry on without them. The story of Farscape has been almost completely tied to John and his experiences, and it would be really interesting to see it outlive him and continue beyond what he could contribute to it. Now, I’m not really expecting either one of them to actually be dead permanently or even at all (maybe that beam is something like a transporter that just happens to leave marbles behind for some reason or something, or they can be put back together, or something else happens and they’re suddenly okay), partially because I doubt the series would actually follow through with killing the both of them before the end of the story, but mostly because both characters are on the cover of the Peacekeeper Wars DVD. But maybe it’ll surprise me.

To Be Continued…

Deconstructing Moya will take a one-week break and return Friday, April 13th for the Season Four wrap-up podcast, and then… Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars!

The crew’s initial plan falls through, their escape routes are cut off, and Crichton’s bomb is deactivated. Scorpius claims to have a way out, but it comes with attempting a last ditch blow against the Scarrans…

Tessa

Oh, yay! I get first dibs on the end of a three-parter!

Okay, uh, let’s see. Once again, there’s a lot going on here, so let’s just go down a mental checklist that I put together in no particular order.

We ended with Scorpius and his potential status as a Scarran spy last episode, so may as well start with him. So, at least by all appearances, it looks like Scorpy’s motives are still what we’ve always known them to be – he wants the Scarrans taken down. His “spy” status with the Emperor appears to have been a long con to survive and buy him time until he could find what he needed to strike against them. It’s a con that may not have been entirely one-sided, either; I don’t think he’s particularly loyal to the Peacekeepers aside from them giving him the means to do his research. It’s entirely possible (and, if he’s been holding up as a spy this long, probable) that he has been giving at least semi-useful information to the Scarrans, at least enough to convince them that he is still working for them.

We also learn more about what his actual plans were. Wormholes were a long term goal for him, and something that he still seems to want as extra leverage against him, but more important to him has been a much more direct means of damaging the Scarran race, namely the means to eradicate their food source that’s more than just a food source (more on that later). It was the entire reason he was holding Stark in the first place way back in Season One (who, coincidentally, apparently worked for the Scarrans prior to that, although quite possibly against his will).

So yeah, Stark. So it turns out he didn’t quite sell his soul to the Scarrans for a chance at getting back at Scorpy, the Stark from last episode was a Bioloid, and the entire bit where Scorpius was being tortured by him was a ploy by the Emperor to fool Ahkna. Uh… that works, I guess. Later they wake up the real Stark, rescuing him from the replicator, and he rejoins Moya by the end, although he doesn’t play a particularly large role in the end, despite Scorpius’ claims that they’ll need him. And… I guess he’s just okay with Scorpius being around and part of the Moya crew? We do still have one episode left in the series, so there’s time to explore his feelings on the matter, I guess, but for him to just be back and part of the crew and apparently cool with everything without any conflict at all seems odd. Then again, this episode was already pretty full, and I’m not sure where there’d be room to really have something more in depth with him that wouldn’t have felt rushed anyways. Still, we spent last episode being reminded that Stark does have major issues with the guy, so I’d feel weird not giving it a mention that… it doesn’t seem to get a mention. Oh well. Not a huge deal, all in all, I guess.

It also turns out that Harvey was lying about transferring data from John’s brain to Scorpius. Which does make sense, since as was mentioned a few episodes back, I’m not sure how Scorpius would have had the resources to make that kind of adjustment and why he wouldn’t have just made it a normal feature if he could do that anyways. It also raises the question of whether or not Harvey can ever really be gotten rid of. Scorpius did actually put him “to sleep”, so to speak, and the only reason he was reactivated at all was as a fail-safe should John try to betray Scorpy. We get an interesting little Harvey brain-scene (yay!) where John gets the entire moral issue flipped around on him. He’s intent on accusing Scorpius of stabbing them all in the back (something that, as it turns out by the end, may not even have really been true anyways), but Harvey points out that John was already set to screw Scorpius over himself, and that his betrayal isn’t any less screwy than what he’s accusing Scorpy of.

Grayza gets more to do in this episode, and we see her finally cave to the crumbling situation and very nearly throw away the lives of the entire Command Carrier in an attempt to become a martyr. She’s been working very hard towards a goal of peace (a misguided and twisted version of it, to be fair), and she’s been watching her work become totally undone over the last handful of episodes. Her career within the Peacekeepers is almost certainly over, but more than that, assuming that her mind-control boob sweat gland thing was something she took on for her plans also, she’s effectively shortened her life considerably for nothing. It would be kind of tragic, if not for how creepy her methods had been and how disastrous her version of “peace” would probably have ended up if she’d won (it’s also interesting that she’s the second Peacekeeper “Big Bad” of the series, after Crais, to lose her top villain status to Scarrans rather abruptly, if you count Scorpius at least partially as such). Braca finally tips his hand, invoking Peacekeeper protocol to remove her from command once it’s clear she wants to take her entire ship down with her. I’m curious as to how exactly Braca has been overriding her mind-control powers, as it’s apparently something the others on the ship are able to get around also, considering they refuse to kill Braca when commanded to.

Sikozu finally tells the others the full story about her, revealing that she’s a Psycho Soldier Bioloid designed specifically to kill Scarrans, and wipes out an entire group of them in one go. That’s, uh, wow. She has to spend the rest of the episode recovering after that, but still. Also her relationship with Scorpius goes from being hinted at subtext to flat out text.

And finally, those Red Flowers. They did turn out to be something special (not surprising, given how badly the Scarrans freaked out when they found out someone was in the cavern). Apparently they need a constant supply of them, as they act as some kind of evolutionary catalyst for them, increasing their intellect and basically making it possible for them to be an influential power in the universe in the first place. According to Harvey, Scarran physiology seems to be so adverse to this state that if they’re cut off from the plants, they’ll start regressing at least in their mental capacities, until, in his words “your dog could beat them at Checkers”. We don’t know how big the Katratzi supply is compared to any of the other places the Scarrans might be growing them, but Scorpius seems to believe that destroying this particular supply would set them back hundreds of cycles. At the very least, it’s stated that the Scarrans have an extremely difficult time holding influence except in places where they have easy access to the plant, so knocking out the garden on Katratzi would effectively force them to give up territory surrounding it, or at least weaken their hold on it considerably. It’s enough for Scorpius to trade away the possibility of obtaining wormhole knowledge for it, so Crichton dropping a nuke on it has to be a fairly significant blow to the race as a whole.

In the end, Moya and crew have effectively obliterated yet another enemy base, skyrocketed their kill count yet again, thwarted both Grayza and Ahnka’s ambitions totally, and may have killed off the Scarran emperor (although as pragmatic as he seemed to be, I would be surprised if that actually turned out to be the case, and I fully expect that he managed to hop off the base in time after Crichton and friends burrowed up through his conference room), all while managing to keep themselves alive in the end. John now owes nothing to Scorpius, the Scarrans have been hit hard, and the second Peacekeeper to hunt them down across the universe has been taken out of power. Crichton is exhausted, and his conscience is damaged beyond repair, but all things considered he might be… safe?

Oh, right, there was that thing where he told the Scarran emperor flat out that Earth has tons of the super plants that the Scarrans need to stay in power growing naturally. But I’m sure that won’t have any consequences at all.

Kevin

I’m wavering a bit here, though it’s only on a couple points. Again, there’s still one episode plus a miniseries left, so the questions I have might be answered next week, or next month, or they might not be answered at all!

Alright, let’s break it down, and it’s somewhat difficult to split it up by plot threads because they’re so tightly meshed together, but we’ll go with the Crichton/Scorpius/Flower thread as the A-Plot, because that’s the most driving of the conflicts this episode.

Scorpius is a double agent. Scorpius is a triple agent. Scorpius is… completely straight-forward and telling the truth again, we’re led to believe, and after all that, Crichton takes him at face value. Which… I was all prepared to gripe about, even up to and including writing this paragraph, but here’s the thing; it’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than personal betrayals and perceived betrayals and yes, even wormholes, as Scorpius barely even hesitates to admit. It’s all about the Scarrans, about their threat to the universe, and though Crichton confronts Scorpius early on, Our Boy Scorpius is able to turn it right back around and point out that no, actually, he was doing all he could to help and that Crichton was the one to stab him in the back and leave him there.

The moment of that confrontation, actually, is especially gripping, and I’m going to have to watch it over and over and over again, because even now I can’t decipher it. Is Scorpius actually surprised to find out Crichton actually was just going to leave him there? Though I’m absolutely certain that Scorpius wouldn’t have expected Crichton and company to storm Katratzi for his sake, there must have been some thought process when he did see Crichton there. Was it that Crichton was as annoyingly good of a guy as he kept saying he was? I honestly can’t tell, and the more I write about it, the more I subconsciously try to project my own opinions onto it, so I’ll save it for further study.

But that’s just the thing, and I love that not only can I not tell what that moment is actually about, but it’s the final turning point in Crichton and Scorpius’s relationship. They may have even upgraded to full kismesis status, though probably no longer as violent as all that. It is here, too, that we finally see confirmation of what we knew all along; that Scorpius and Crichton’s evil masterminding and penchant for Xanatos Speed Chess rival only each other’s, and that they are far more alike than either of them are probably willing to admit openly.

The A-plot comes to a head with the dropping of the bomb, this is undeniably true, but Crichton began that thought process when he saw Scorpius, for the absolute first time ever, go absolutely apeshit. This has never happened before. Ever. Even during his rage-fight with Crais, Scorpius remained perfectly in control of his Scarran berserker nature, and was able to force it back on his own when it no longer suited his needs. When confronted with the very objective he had sought for years – toppling the Scarran Empire, destroying their dependence on Flower Power – and there is a force field he cannot take down? He loses it. Absolutely gone. He shoots at it. He stalks over and starts punching the frell out of it.

“I. Do not. LOSE!”

It’s the most candid that Crichton has ever seen Scorpius, and it’s quite possibly what tips him finally over to helping him not out of necessity, but on his own judgement. This is what Scorpius wanted the wormholes for. This is worth ten Harveys and all the effort from the past however many years combined.

The whole scene is extremely powerful, and it’s the culmination of everything we’ve ever seen from Scorpius, from the very beginning.

The B-plot (I’m arbitrarily selecting the Scarran politics and double-dealings and Emperor Red Dude for this) and the C-plot (The Fall Of Grayza And How Awesome Is Braca Anyway, He Is Pretty Awesome) are far more interconnected with each other and don’t really stand out all that well on their own without the primary thread, but there’s still a lot involved with that. The points I’m wavering on are what Tessa has already pointed out; Stark, for the most part, actually, and his true feelings on Scorpius being one of the for lack of a better term Good Guys.

I’m starting to lose my focus here, and that’s definitely a sign to pass the torch.

Noel

I really dug this episode, but I have a few problems with it and want to get them out of the way first.

Grayza. As Tessa mentioned, yeah, what the hell happened to her magic boobs? Visibly, they’re still there for all to see, but why has she completely given up using the sweet gland/mind control thing? She doesn’t try using it on John during their confrontation. We haven’t seen her use it on Braca in a long time. Did she milk herself dry? Is it starting to lose effectiveness as the early sign that her system is starting to shut down and she’s near death? What’s going on?

Katratzi. Why use your most highly guarded and secretive base for a conference containing members of factions that are your enemies? Secret’s out! And why keep the key stock of your mother plant, the thing you need to make your brains work, inside the secret base you’ve just invited all your enemies to?

Sikozu. In the last episode, she revealed she’s a bioroid, despite us never seeing the electronic components or milky fluid of a bioroid whenever she’s lost a limb. Here, they reveal she’s “special”. That she’s a genetically modified being created by the Kalish resistance. Okay. But then why did she say she’s a bioroid? And she has the superpower of floating up into the air and emitting a super charged radiation that shorts out Scarran heat glands. Which somehow kills them instantly… despite us having met a Scarran who survived the glands being surgically removed. And which doesn’t affect Scorpius at all, who’s cooling suit suggests he still has the heat gland… despite us having met a Scarran who survived them being surgically removed. And I don’t care what it’s intended to target, you can’t pump out that much radiation without it also having some kind of effect on the other people around you, especially the woman with the fetus in her belly. Them getting through with no issues because they looked away is pure bullshit.

Stark. I’m sorry, but the story is actually more compelling if the real Stark had been the one torturing Scorpius, because it’s totally in line with their past and it’s not like we haven’t seen him go deranged before. Putting it all on a random bioroid robs the previous episode of its dramatic impact. And I want you to tell me how the bioroid copy is capable of doing Stark’s eye energy superpower against Scorpius’s soul. Seriously. I’m waiting. Go ahead and tell me.

Wormholes and unrealized realities. Okay, this didn’t have anything to do with the episode, I just wanted to mention it again to piss off Kevin.

One not only gets a sense from the entirety of the season that the writing staff really was just making it up as they went along, but we get that from this 3 part story itself. They set up things that they then directly contradict in the payoff. They do a big twist, then seem wary of the full implications of said twist (Sikozu is a robot copy, Stark’s gone to the dark side) and instead try to handwave their way around it to make it more heroic. If you decide to do a story, go with it. Don’t double back an episode later and try to sweep it under the rug. So much of this stuff was unnecessary. Let Stark be lost in his rage. Let Sikozu be a robot copy who brings with her identity issues. Let Grayza use her mind control abilities, which makes her ultimate failure to control her pawns all the more biting. And don’t write yourself out of a corner with a magical microwave sunlight girl!

Gah!

That said, I really dug this episode. Tension is running throughout. The factions are turning against one another. The Scarrans and Peacekeepers are forced into a standoff. One Scarran plots a coup against another. One Peacekeeper succeeds in a coup against another (Go Braca!). Everyone is running around doing backstabs and deals and shooting things. And then there’s the bomb. The glorious Chekov’s gun that’s hanging off John’s belt for 1 and 3/4 episodes just waiting for its opportunity to go off. And go off it does. My favorite shot is the distant view of the planet with these glowing blue bursts going off like multiple Coyotes just fell a very long way before impacting with bamfs. Best of all is John reminding us of what makes him John as he mourns the use of the weapon afterwards, the action that he was pushed into by his enemies. John isn’t John because he does crazy badass things. He’s John because he does crazy badass things… then regrets it later. He doesn’t like being the one wearing a nuclear bomb in a field of flowers. He doesn’t like being the one killing dozens, if not hundreds of people in one fell swoop. He doesn’t like the possibility that he’s killed so many that, one of these times, it may be some hapless innocent for whom it can’t be justified.

The absolute heart of this episode is definitely John and Scorpius. These two have been so deeply opposed to one another that, no, I wouldn’t say they failed to recognize how similar they are so much as I’d say they’ve made each other into themselves. John has forced Scorpius to ditch plans and dive into things head first, and how being open and honest about something sometimes gets you better results than duplicity. Scorpius has forced John to drench his head with machinations, playing enemies off of one another instead of trying to run from them all, and stabbing people in the back when the opportune time comes to do so. Here, they confront the level of one another they’ve become, and both go through their own breakdowns, showing just how far they’ve strayed from their intended paths.

And I’m with Kevin in hoping they’ll frell, at least once, if only to get it out of their system.

Weston

Agenda items: Points addressed by fellow reviewers.

Bioloid, I think, may be a fairly generic term for synthetic humanoids. They’re like replicants, not easily distinguishable from ordinary members of a species. Sikozu’s a custom job, specifically built for infiltration and assassination. Likewise Zukash – he wouldn’t have been able to fool the Scarran scans for as long as he did if he wasn’t picture perfect. The Aeryn clone had issues; maybe it was a blank and had to use the default hardware rather than properly customizing the internal organs, perhaps the brain copy would have been better if Akhna had enough time to do a proper job. It looks like there are definitely differences between the Scarran bioloids (Aeryn and Stark) and the Kalish models (Sikozu and Zukash) – could be the Kalish created the technology and only gave their evil overlords the basic model.

Scarrans are totally Mimigas. Without the flowers, they’re peabrained lizards. With them, they’re hulking atomic death machines. The Crystherium plants only grow under extremely limited circumstances, though, and Scarran refrigeration technology has not developed to the point where they can transport them long distances. Must be all the heat glands. Scarrans apparently need regular infusions of the flower petals, or they revert to their weaker state. It’s the only explanation for why they can’t expand to points in space that don’t have the Crystherium, and might explain Naj Gil’s unusual coloring – perhaps he was going through withdrawl. All told, it’s a weakness, and one that Scorpius is all too happy to exploit.

The original plan was doomed to fail. Not from anyone’s intervention, but because Scarran security was just that good. Every member of the group was picked up, and the Scarran emperor himself arrived at Lo’La moments after Crichton and company. Scorpius called it, unfortunately, and everyone now finds themselves working on plans B through E in an attempt to successfully escape. Noranti and Rygel recover the original Stark (M’Stark?), but not in time to get anything useful before everything goes to hell. Crichton attempts to hitch a ride with Grayza, but the Scarrans are ready to open fire if they so much as flip on a turn signal. D’Argo checks the locks on Lo’La and finds that the Scarrans used a slimjim to get in – he’ll need three hours to verify that everything is where it should be.

Now, desperate, our heroes trust Scorpius. Not because he can get them out, but because he might be able to create a big enough mess to disrupt the Scarrans to the point that they’ll be able to escape. Sikozu does manage to get what they need, at the cost of the life of the Kalish resistance member. Once in the Crystherium chamber, Scorpius has his breakdown – decades of planning, magnificent last-minute improvisation, he’s only meters away from his goal… and there’s nothing he can do. No tool can pierce that shield, no local override can shut it down, no power conduit can disable it. Everything he ever wanted is right in front of him, and he can’t seize it. It’s the farthest he’s fallen since escaping from the Dreadnaught all those cycles ago.

Sikozu pulls off her full scale radiation trick when the elevator returns, killing all four Scarrans but weakening both her and Scorpius. Plan E hasn’t gone anywhere, so now they’re on to Plan F: Get to Lo’La and flee. D’Argo drives a rabrokator about as well as he does a police car, unfortunately, and winds up putting them in the conference room. There, trapped and outgunned, they’re out of plans. No way out. No effective weapons. No options but surrender or suici- wait, why is Crichton opening the floor?

John Crichton, master of the third option. He even uses that desperate measure to resolve his debt to Scorpius. The bomb detonates in Jennek’s hands, destroying the Crystherium chamber and gutting the Scarran base. That buys them the distraction necessary to escape in Lo’La.

Chiana and D’Argo get back together, as they’ve been building up to all season. Maybe they haven’t completely reconciled, but relief at surviving Katratzi goes a long way. Sikozu and Scorpius are officially a couple. Her line in that scene is why I objected to Sikozu/Zerbat a while back. Crichton and Aeryn… man, there’s nothing I can say about that scene. They’re comfortable as a couple. Complementary. He talks because he has to, and she doesn’t because there’s nothing to say. It’s a perfect moment, the culmination of four years of character development and relationship building.

Stark and Noranti on the same ship. This can only end in tears.

Braca’s awesome moment of crowning is truly awesome. Remember when he was just a flunky? Crais’ number three man? He’s come so far, and I love how he’s finally taking control. This is the moment that secures him in my mind as a great character.

In contrast, Grayza has fallen so far. From the time she boarded Scorpius’ Carrier with Moya in tow, she’s had iron control. Not just with the rohypnosweat, but the authority granted her by Peacekeeper Command. The former, she abused with cruel abandon. The latter, she lost when she ordered a suicidal attack against a superior foe. To die in combat is one thing, but dying pointlessly? She discovers honor just in time to sacrifice it in a vain attempt to pursue the greater good. The only thing she could accomplish at this point is starting the war she worked so hard to delay. Crichton’s turnabout has shattered her composure, and she has no backup plans. Scorpius, she is not.

Akhna continues to be disturbingly competent. Crichton quotes Macbeth at her while Aeryn runs interference. She would be a truly scary nemesis.

Harvey uses the phrase “Your side, my side!” while jabbering at Crichton. It’s a great callback.

In which the Moyans once again penetrate a hostile base to suppress the use of wormhole technology. This time, they’re dropping in uninvited, and the security measure is rather more… extreme.

Weston

This episode starts strong and stays there. Scorpius is in Akhna’s tender talons under constant torture, and Lo’La is riding to the rescue. The Crichton Plan is to stride into Katratzi, wave the potential sale of his wormhole technology under the Emperor’s nose, start a riot between rival factions within the Empire, and escape in the confusion. The key to this ridiculous plan? Crichton built a pocket-sized nuclear bomb, and is wearing it like a fashion accessory.

Repeating that: Crichton’s wearing a nuke. One rigged with multiple redundant deadman switches – if any of a dozen parameters are exceeded, the bomb will detonate. John Crichton goes out with a bang, as does Aeryn, most of a hidden Scarran base, and hopefully Grayza. Though it would be really nice if the bomb didn’t go off at all.

Negotiations are underway between Emperor Staleek of the Scarrans and Commandant Grayza of the Peacekeepers. One has the overwhelming force necessary to utterly crush the opposition, and the other is playing out a bluff for all she’s worth in the hopes that by the time the truth is revealed it won’t be a bluff anymore. Grayza’s got a killer poker face, but that won’t help her at all when it’s time to show the cards. Then Crichton crashes in, dances on tables, and turns her negotiations into a bidding war. Now her plan to stall for time has to incorporate a way to prevent Crichton from just handing the tech that she needs over to the Scarrans. Hell, if she can get it in the process, shortcut her own path to wormhole weapons, that’s not a bad outcome.

Granted, she could have had wormhole weapons a cycle ago if she hadn’t been so keen on shooting Scorpius in the back. Whoops.

The only concession that Crichton grants her during that first meeting in the conference room is maintaining the fiction that Peacekeepers already have the weapons. He recognizes that threat as the only thing keeping Scarrans out of Peacekeeper space for the moment, and prematurely revealing the truth would be… bad. Among other things, Crichton’s statuesque daughter is directly between these two forces.

Each member of the team, now acting as a cohesive unit, has their area of responsibility. Chiana and Noranti are on recon, scouting the base for Scorpius and possible escape routes. Sikozu is assigned to infiltrate and influence the Kalish, as D’Argo and Rygel do the same with the Charrids. Crichton is waving his Fat Man around with Aeryn running bodyguard.

Chiana gets the chance to confront Jennek, the Scarran from the border post. It’s brief, and painfully unsatisfying for her. Apparently Scarrans are as invulnerable in their vulnerables as they are everywhere else.

D’Argo gets to drinking with the Charrids before bringing Rygel in to engage in negotiations. The Dominar is at his best here, charming and swaying a general from a genocidal species that he hates with every bone in his tiny body. The seeds that he plants bloom fantastically.

Sikozu… man, that was unexpected. D’Argo has to schmooze his way into the Charrid’s den. Sikozu just walks up, identifies a member of the Kalish resistance movement against the Scarrans, flashes her ID at him by spinning her eye around (what.), and outs herself as a bioloid. So wow, that’s three things we didn’t know about her in about four seconds. Explains why she couldn’t accept translator microbes – she doesn’t have a colonizable brain stem. In less than a minute, she lays everything out for the resistance member she found in the Kalish command structure and lets him do the heavy lifting on the riot. He influences his boss, hands over the code for the elevator to the flower room, and kickstarts the riot. It’s refreshingly nice to have friends in high places.

That elevator. Nobody ever figured Scarrans for hippiemancers, but the highest security area on the base is a cavern filled with red flowers. Flowers that Staleek calls a delicacy when offering them to Crichton. Flowers that Crichton insultingly identifies as hummingbird feeder. Flowers whose precise importance to the Scarrans is unknown to their thrall races. Flowers that we have actuallyseen before.

Emperor Staleek gives orders to disable the car alarm on Lo’La to access the starcharts and logs. That could be bad.

Crichton gives Staleek the coordinates for a wormhole – the partly unstable one that leads into the network. That could be extremely bad.

I’ve actually lost track of the number of twists in this episode. Next on my list: Stark’s back! Working for the Scarrans! Interrogating Scorpius! And intending to use his Stykera ability to absorb Scorpius’ knowledge when he dies. Suddenly awkward. Guessing he didn’t find Zhaan.

Akhna is brutal and effective. Her disbelief in the strength of her enemies is a remarkably strong asset, from Grayza’s wormhole weapons to Crichton’s bomb. Her interrogation of Scorpius, her bringing in Stark to interrogate Scorpius, her use of the heat probe on Crichton after being specifically told that it would trigger the bomb… she’s dangerous. I can see why Scorpy likes her.

Scorpius has been working as a spy for Staleek for ten cycles. Could explain how he knows Scarran spy codes. The Emperor releases him into Crichton’s custody as a gesture of good faith, believing that Scorpius will get him what he wants. During the escape, that turns out to have been an effective gamble.

The confrontation between Crichton and Scorpius is really something. These two have been at each other’s throats for three years. Scorpius is in a position of weakness, and Crichton has one goal: Prevent wormhole knowledge from falling into Scarran hands. Well, two, if you count escaping alive. But the first is easily accomplished by killing Scorpius. As interrogation techniques go, it’s quick.

The riot and subsequent escape attempt is fairly awesome. Kalish climbing the walls, Charrids knocking them back off. D’Argo and Sikozu using the same trick multiple times to get within punching range of guards. Noranti testing out her powder on a Scarran. Braca popping a Charrid in the back to enable Scorpius’ escape. Everything seems to be going according to plan… until Scorpius punches Aeryn in the face and tackles Crichton. Is he doing this for Staleek? Does he still have Crichton’s best interests in mind?

And as the screen freezes on Crichton’s enraged face, the rapid beeping of the bomb carries us to the closing credits.

Tessa

This is another one of those episodes that’s just jam-packed with things. We get a few questions answered, and a lot more raised, and everything is about to come to a head in a big way.

So first off, we finally get our answer as to just who Sikozu was all this time. She’s a bioloid, but apart from that, she’s part of a resistance group against the Scarrans. This does explain both why translator microbes wouldn’t work on her and her ability to learn languages at an alarmingly fast rate, as well as being able to re-attach lost limbs, traits that normal Kalish don’t appear to share (the ability to walk on walls, however, does appear to be a normal Kalish trait, as we finally see them do it in this episode). It also goes a ways to explaining why she was so interested in striking up a closer alliance with Scorpius, as they shared the exact same goals.

Or… did they? The reveal that Scorpius actually has been a Scarran spy the entire time took me completely by surprise, and I find myself really hesitant to buy into anything in particular just yet. Obviously, Scorpius has been working as a spy for the Emperor based on their conversation, but his motives could still be just about anywhere at this point. Was his backstory a fabrication (either in part or in total), and was he using Peacekeeper resources to research wormholes not to use against the Scarrans but to deliver to them? Or is he playing a double agent to both sides, and is only trying to save face? Were the Red Flowers we’ve seen in his quarters before now some sort of payment or perk to the deal from them, or did he just manage to get his own from somewhere? If he really is loyal to the Scarrans over the Peacekeepers, then why doesn’t he hand over what he knows about wormholes? For that matter, does he really even have any of that knowledge, or was Harvey’s claim that he beamed the information straight to his brain a total lie to get Crichton to head after him?

There are so many angles to come at this with, and all of them seem totally plausible. I’m really excited to get a resolution on this.

On the flip side of the coin, Grayza kind of faded into the background for me in this episode. Obviously the real action is going on with the Scarran side of the debate, since Grayza isn’t the one that has what the crew is trying to get, but something just bugged me about her role in the whole thing. I think part of it is that my mind is still sort of boggling at her doing a total 180 on the wormhole angle without batting an eye, when she took active steps to ensure than the research project was shut down. It could just be total denial from someone who is very sensitive to her reputation about the fact that she made a rather massive misstep, although there’s a tiny little potential stray plot thread floating around that maybe she knew (or suspected) the truth (whether it does turn out to be true or false) about Scorpius’ ties to the Scarrans, and was looking to shut him down rather than the actual idea of looking into wormhole tech.

It’s a stretch, maybe, but it’s possible, and seems to fit the least awkwardly for me, because otherwise the whole thing is just a really big “Oops” moment for her.

Also, Stark’s back! With hair!

It might seem a little weird that he’d defect to the Scarrans just because they give him a shot at revenge against Scorpy (since he really should know what it is he’s actually agreeing to hand over to them and why it’s a bad idea), but then again, this is the man who totally slaughtered his people on a whim. It kinda makes sense that Stark has just a little bit of a lapse of judgement when it involves Scorpius. I have to wonder what he thinks of John by now if he knows that Scorpius has been hanging out on Moya.

Oh, and those Red Flowers. What exactly is it that’s so important about them to the Scarrans that they need to be locked away under high security? Are they just that enthusiastic about snacking, or are these the kinds of things that turn cute little bunny rabbit people into raging monsters?

“Huzzah!”

Kevin

The middle of any trilogy is always a precarious position. It often ends up the weaker point due to storyline limitations or necessary exposition, or it can completely knock it out of the frelling park due to genius use of narrative flow. I’m not quite certain where I’d put “Hot To Katratzi” just yet, but by sheer usage of narrative causality I’m leaning towards the latter.

Let’s recap. Act One, we put our guy up a tree. They rescued Aeryn, there were complications and Scarrans along the way, but they got her and The Baby – who I will hereafter refer to as Skippy as that was my parents’ catch-all name for all four of us before we were born and had names decided upon – out of the Mobile Eugenics Platform and, more importantly, rescued Aeryn from that hideous yellowish jumpsuit. (If there’s one thing that Scarrans have to answer for, it’s that horrendous crime of fashion.)

There are a couple points that Weston and Tessa brought up that I’d like to explore a bit further, here, because while there’s quite a lot to talk about in this episode, these were the things that stuck out to me the most.

First off: Sikozu Shamwow Shibata Sommerset you know the joke I’m trying to make here. We’ve learned that she’s a bioloid, yes, but what does that mean? The last bioloid we encountered was of Scarran manufacture, so either there are more organizations out there with this technology, or the Scarrans are playing the really, really, really long con. It explains a lot about her, such as why she only eats once a fortnight, but it also raises a lot more questions than it answers. For example: Does this mean there’s a Sikozu out there, hidden in some Scarran cage, who doesn’t know anyone on Moya at all? (Or, more likely, is that Sikozu dead? It’s been at least a full cycle since we met her, and a year in Scarran captivity…) Or – and here’s a scarier thought – was “Sikozu” created from the ground up to serve a specific purpose? What purpose is that, anyway? Is that why she was a Scarran spy in that Unrealized Reality? Is that also why her hair is so supernaturally amazing?

Of course, if we allow the variable ScarranSpy to be declared value=TRUE, then what does that mean for the apparent Kalish Infiltration? We’re led to speculate that the bioloid incursion is meant to destabilize either the Kalish’s dependence on the Scarrans, or a coup-d’état on the Scarrans altogether? Or is it something else entirely? We haven’t been given nearly enough to make an informed guess, and the series is winding down to the close. Perhaps, like the Nebari, it’s an unanswered question… but then again, we have an entire miniseries, and Sikozu’s on the cover of my DVD case.

I could speculate all day, with diagrams and flowcharts and Sweet Bro And Hella Jeff references, but the main point is, it’s mysterious. We don’t know. We’re not meant to know. We’re meant to have an ominous unsettling feeling, especially considering her close ties to Scorpius.

Speaking of Scorpius… I’m on the fence here, and here’s why: Throughout the series, we’ve been shown that Scorpius Does Not Lie. He misleads, he tricks, he cajoles and flatters and dances around merrily but he never lies, because he knows that the truth is that much scarier. The truth can cut deeper than any lie. From his initial appearance, he has been a tall, dark, mysterious and absolute magnificent son of a frellnik.

Except, he said he’d remove the neural clone. That was a lie. Except, he said his name was Captain Whatsis when arriving at the check-in station. Very much a lie. Two little clues that Scorpius might not be devoid of untruths as we previously suspected.

Still, it was one of the best episodes of the series where we went back and found out why he hated Scarrans so much. I said then and will say again now, it is far more credible that this is the truth, because he presents it in such a way that doesn’t paint him in a flattering light. Yes, he was an abortive experiment gone wrong. Yes, he did horrible things. And yes, he went back and killed his creche-mother not out of justice, but revenge, and gave Scarran secrets to the Peacekeepers.

Now it’s been revealed that he’s a Scarran spy. How long ago did those events take place? Was it ten cycles, or longer? The timeline isn’t clear, but it just doesn’t add up with what we know about him. Again, unless Scorpius has been playing the really, really, really long con, it’s far more likely that he’s a triple-quadruple agent on the rocks with a side of fries.

Regardless, there’s one part left in this three-parter, and the tree’s a-blazin’.

Things to note this episode:

Aeryn and Crichton are in perfect synergy now. They’ve been together four years (give or take), been through absolute hell for each other, and it’s only made them stronger. It shows, it absolutely does, how much the trust has evolved. Sure, the whole trust thing was a minor wibbly bit of plot-related jumble back and forth this season, but Aeryn was abducted by Scarrans. Taken on an untraceable ore freighter, deep into enemy territory, on its way to a secret base that nobody had ever even heard of, let alone knew where to find it. She was, for all intents and purposes, already dead. She kept herself sane by believing that Crichton would come for her, something that had never happened for any of the Scarrans’ other prisoners before, something that was statistically impossible within the reality of this universe. And he came for her.

I will repeat that. John Crichton, backwards monkey-man from Rocksville, Earth, on the complete ass-end of the galaxy, who had zero understanding of the way the universe worked when she first met him, bent reality and violated the laws of time and space to find her. It may have been a bit of major plot contrivance that got Noel and Tessa up into a frothing rage, but it happened.

“Hey, Stark, where’ve you been this entire time?” “Oh, over there, remember?”

OHGOD EYES

When Scorpius started frothing at the mouth and spitting viscous clear-white fluid, Tessa and I looked at each other, and in that moment, we knew exactly what Noel was going to write about this week.

Noel

Nah, ever since the blood pact between John and Scorpius revealed that the milky substance Scorpius has repeatedly gagged up over the course of the series is merely his own blood, a lot of the fun and mystery of the sploogerific imagery has faded away. That said, he’s drooling out the stuff like he just deep throated a rod that built up a few days worth of the baby making juice before popping off all over his tonsils.

And speaking of cock, and I the only one who thought the Emperor looked like a giant rooster with his bright red armor of feathery spikes? Don’t get me wrong, he’s awesome and a genuine threat, but he did have the look of a chanticleer eagerly pacing the roof of the hen house, making sure his flock was all in order before giving a bit of a doodle-do as the full situation dawned on him.

Let’s see what bits of the everything already covered by the others I can weasel a few extra observations out of…

Kevin, I have no issue with the idea of Crichton breaking reality to go after the woman he loves. Just with the way in which it was executed, and I’m not wrong for disagreeing with you on that. But I’ve said that say and the episode is in the past. I agree with you here that the two, now that they’re together and have fully and openly accepted their togetherness, harmonize like a Shintari jingle for Jell-O Pops. Their synchronicity, the way they bounce ideas off one another, the way one is constantly at the other’s back. Even when they seem to be arguing over Scorpius’ fate, there’s a unity to their banter that almost gives them away. And when they have their moments of peace between manipulations and tense standoffs, they slow dance in an elevator, then unbuckle trou and start doing It in the sacred Scarran garden of acquired tastes. They’re beautiful together.

Speaking of the manipulations, I love the way John and Co. force their way into enemy territory, then pull a Red Harvest/Yojimbo/Fistfull of Dollars/Last Man Standing/Sukiyaki Western Django/(insert all ripoffs of the above) by siding with various factions and gradually turning them against one another, so the villains will do the dirty work of cutting through the bad guys themselves, and the heroes can just waltz through the devastation. And Sikozu (eye-yi-yi, Zordon) reveals to us that factions are already at work within the factions to destabilize factions and the factions that oppose the factions, so all one needed to do was pull a few strands and, whammo, a huge mutha-faction riot.

Stark is back! Unexplained, yes, but done properly this time. At least we saw him leave and the mystery of where he’s been lingers instead of being brushed off. I kept thinking to myself, “Gee, I hope someone clues him in that Scorpius is working with John.” Then I realized he wouldn’t care. The opportunity to tear apart the soul of the man who tore apart his mind is just too juicy of a temptation to ignore.

And Scorpius. Oh, Scorpius. Don’t you all know by now that Scorpius serves neither the Peacekeepers nor the Scarrans? No, he only serves Scorpius, and he’s such a meticulous planner that he’d of course have connections and angles on both sides that he can manipulate whenever they become useful to benefit him. I don’t think he wants either side to have the wormhole weapons. He wants them so he’ll finally have the power to stake out his own side and do away with any and all threats as he so pleases.

I have nothing further to add. Except to once again use the word “cock”.

“You nearly killed me.”
“No I didn’t…….. But I did kill others. By my actions, I have taken innocent lives.”
“Welcome to Moya.”

Moya and crew take their first step into Scarran space to track down and rescue Aeryn, only to find her ready and waiting for them. Along with bunches of guards, Charrids, an automated security system than kills anyone carrying a weapon, a Scarran, and a plague of their own making.

Noel

This is one of those episodes where they take a great setup, then completely yank the story in another direction, then do it again, then finally wrap it all up with a pretty little bow… which they then strangle a puppy with. Oh how I love it when I don’t have a clue how things will plays out from moment to moment, especially when it all ultimately holds together.

We open with our crew docking Moya into a Scarran-owned base where they’re required to undergo a 5-day period of decontamination before they’re allowed to proceed into Scarran space and to their destination of Katratzi. Yes, our heroes are quietly entering the outer gates of the enemy stronghold, with John once again donning the red leather (but not the accent) of a Peacekeeper and Scorpius, calling himself Wentrask due to the likelihood of their coms being tapped, standing firm in the position of Captain. Yes, Scorpius as the head man of the boat. *shivers*

The station is operated by the Kalish, Sikozu’s people, who were conquered long ago by the Scarrans and turned into a servant race. There isn’t much exploration of this as they stand quite assertively against a Scarran who wants to break through their protocol, but given that the protocol was likely written by Scarrans, I guess I can understand it. Considering we’re suddenly seeing a station full of Sikozu’s people, I’m a little surprised we don’t see much of their unique physiology come into play. No precision memory techniques. No confusion from people unable to use translator microbes when the man claiming to be a Sebacean is speaking English. No architecture specifically designed for a race that can casually alter its gravitational balance. No limb reattachment (imagine a bomb going off and people trying to sort out which limbs are theirs). Nothing is really made of these people at all aside from their leader being a typical clueless bureaucrat and Sikozu having the hots for a dude – which plays out with Chiana, too – in a relationship that doesn’t go anywhere.

I can’t fault them any of this, though, because that’s not what this episode is about. This isn’t the story of Sikozu’s culture or people. They’re just a tasty little background detail that we’re casually introduced to before moving on to the main event. For you see, our heroes, in their quest to reach Katratzi, have just docked in the very same decontamination station as the Scarran freighter that’s hauling Aeryn to the secret prison. And it’s leaving in HALF AN ARN. So now our story turns into a great conman/heist/prison break film where our heroes scramble to get Aeryn and her baby bump out of enemy hands.

And how do they do this? By having Rygel pretend to be sick, Noranti show up as a doctor who can cure him, and then she turns his fake sickness into a real plague that starts to drop people left and right. Whoops. It’s a wonderful twist as everyone comes up with the perfect plan, and then Noranti does the Noranti thing and creates a mess that nobody is sure they’ll actually end up surviving, let alone use as a ploy. Noranti is her wonderful self, being all crazy with digestive juices and herbs, and Rygel is a hoot as her skin peeling victim, but what really surprises me is the final moment, where we see actual guilt break through the unusual reasoning of our resident witch, actual regret that she took lives and put her friends in danger. And Rygel tells her not to dwell on it while also admitting his distate in the lives he’s taken over the years. It’s a brief scene of bonding between these two that comes out of nowhere when you’d expect them to instead be at each others’ throats.

When John learns Aeryn is on board the docked freighter, he has two ideas to get to her, both of which are totally John. First, he pretends to be horny and tries to seduce Aeryn’s Sebacean caretaker. Which doesn’t work. At all. So he instead lures her with what he claims to be a cure for the Hynerian plague. This also doesn’t work as she needs both doses for herself and her patient, meaning she doesn’t need him, but before he gets knocked out of the picture, he spots Aeryn and clonks the caretaker on the noggin. This still doesn’t work, as he’s quickly captured and heat tortured, so it’s off to Plan B: cut the power of both the freighter and the entire station, and go in with a massive gun blazing. This does work, and the lovers are finally reunited with Aeryn’s baby still in her belly.

The big twist is that they have to leave Scorpius behind, which nobody but Sikozu particularly cares about in a moment that’s sure to cement her future relationship with the rest of the crew. And the big twist’s big twist? Harvey’s back! And stronger than ever! Well, no, he’s still buffoonish and can’t put up a fight against John, but he’s been lingering in the shadows of John’s mind this entire time, livestreaming everything he’s found there straight into Scorpius’ head. Meaning Scorpius already knew about John and Aeryn. Meaning Scoripus already knows John has no interest in rescuing him. Meaning he’s just given John the motivation to do so because he already knows everything he needs to about wormhole technology.

Welcome to the kickstarter of Season 4’s final arc, an episode so jam packed with twists and drama and humor and pew pew splodey guns that it alone would have made for an incredible season finale. But there’s still three more to go before this volume of the saga comes to a close, and I’m eager to be reminded of whether or not they live up to the example set here. The broader season sure as hell hasn’t.

Some additional thoughts:

Between Rygel, Noranti, Scorpius, and the plague victims, there’s a whole lot of spewing going on in this episode. At least none of it looks like semen this time around.

The visual effects of Moya enterting the station are absolutely stunning.

Chiana and D’Argo seem back on track for a second go at a relationship, what with their quiet little forehead kiss and all.

Man, Aeryn is absolutely broken by this episode. The last time we saw her, she was determined to deal with whoever she had to to keep her baby alive, and now she’s unable to speak and lost between her dreams and reality…… But how is it that, when we see her in the last coule of scenes, she has no marks or holes in her dress from the four nasty things that speared into her abdomen?

I should echo the opening episode quote with “You should have killed him.” “My body count’s already too high.”

Weston

It’s worth noting that the title for this three-episode arc, “We’re So Screwed”, was added after the series was cancelled. Yes, the producers managed to slip their feelings on the cancellation right up front.

Noranti is on the ball in this one. The boys need a plague, so she reactivates a dormant virus in Rygel. Now Rygel’s sick, so she cures him. The plague can also kill Sebaceans, so she starts whipping up a cure for them… but is nabbed by the Charrids. This, unfortunately, is where things go south. She’s still adapting and improvising as quickly as only someone with three hundred years of experience can, but things are spiraling out of her control. The way she chains from one “oh crap” moment to the next is intense. Eventually the best she can do is delay until rescue arrives – which it does, and right in the nick of time.

She’s previously stated that she has no problem with killing, and has demonstrated that she has the resolve. It’s unfortunate when it’s necessary, but nothing to shirk from. Killing innocent bystanders, though? People who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Those who didn’t deserve a swift and terrible death by skin sloughing? That’s an issue. One that Noranti is going to be doing penance for.

Sikozu also has some significant development going on. She remains an outsider on the crew; someone with the Moyans, but not of them. She’s pulling her weight, but the distrust that Chiana and D’Argo show towards her keeps her separate. Her methods are far more thought out than Noranti’s, but she does a similar job of keeping up with developments. Noranti throws things out to see what works; Sikozu has a whiteboard flowchart containing five viable plans of action (including two separate methods of escape).

Strange, isn’t it, that despite her strong survival instinct Sikozu expresses no concern at possible instant death from the Derma Follica outbreak. And how she can’t use translator microbes, but the Kalish on the station have no trouble understanding English. And what’s that odd glow that Sikozu uses to fuse the controls? Hmmm.

I love the handprint food dispenser. One panel for five-fingered humanoids, one panel for giant hands with claws, and one for… butterflies? What is that, an Elcor hoofprint?

(*checks “Mass Effect reference” off the things to do*)

Rygel just gets hammered here. He self-induces projectile vomiting, comes down with The Plague, and his eyebrows slough off. Man, his poor eyebrows. They’ve been getting it all season. Okay, twice now, but the point stands. No wonder he spends so much time grooming them, they grow almost an inch a day.

This episode has one of my favorite Scorpius lines: “You are remarkably perceptive.” It’s second only to “To what purpose?” from season two.

Scorpy has fully committed to this plan. From start to finish, he’s working hard to ensure that Aeryn is rescued. Once Sikozu discovers that she’s at the quarantine station, he recognizes that it represents their best possible chance to get her back. He insinuates himself into the company of Captain Jennek using Scarran verification codes. Of course Scorpius knows Scarran codes. I wonder what would happen if he was forced into an unfamiliar situation. Besides “be magnificently badass”.

Crichton hatches a hare-brained scheme to get aboard the ore freighter that works amazingly well. He switches it up when he spots Aeryn, but that damnable Charrid catches him, and it’s heat probe interrogation time. Crichton’s method of resistance actually works – maybe Katoya’s hotbox paid off. Telling a series of incomplete yet believable truths is fairly awesome.

Things get worse when Jennek decides to transplant Aeryn’s fetus into Chiana. The Charrids take a transport pod over to Moya, nab her, and are gone before anyone’s the wiser, though she does put up a fantastic fight before being disabled. This forces the rescue plan to be expedited. Sikozu disables the station power so that Crichton can pull a one-man-army with a long-barreled pulse rifle. He kills two Charrids, but leaves the stationmaster alive. The return to Moya exploits station security, D’Argo grabs the windshield stickers, all the ships are released and recovered, and the team gets away clean.

Mostly. Scorpius can’t get away from Jennek subtly, and attempts melee combat against a vastly superior foe. That… ends about as well as you might expect. Nobody beats a Scarran in hand-to-hand.

Still, Moya gets away. The only person remotely concerned about Scorpius is Sikozu, and she’s overruled by Chiana’s fist. Crichton’s just happy to have Aeryn back, and has no problem abandoning Scorpy to the tender mercies of the Scarrans. All told, this is a remarkably successful outcome for a group that seems to have disaster following them. The girl is rescued, everyone’s alive and healthy (mostly), Scorpius is no longer a problem, it looks like they can just sail off an-

(bad Transylvanian accent) “Scorpius, he upgrade me to Harvey 2.0.”

“Vun! Vun plot tvist! Ah ah ah!”

In which – oh, frell.

Harvey’s back. And he’s been feeding Scorpius the contents of Crichton’s mind.

Scorpius, who is now on his way to Katratzi.

With John’s wormhole tech.

…frell.

Tessa

Okay, so, uh, I said last week that I wanted the final arc to just pick up and move already, and oh boy did it. Woo!

There’s a vague but interesting parallel between this arc (or, at least the beginning of it) and the final arc to the first season going on here. In both, the crew has to go straight into the enemy’s territory undercover in order to try to save Aeryn. The first time around, of course, it was the Peacekeepers, and here it’s the Scarrans, but it’s a similar set-up. Interestingly enough, the antagonist from the first who is the one that captured a major member of that effort is the one in this one who gets captured himself. I don’t know if this was set up this way intentionally, but I thought it was a neat little comparison.

I love what’s being teased with Sikozu here. From the beginning of this season, there were these constant hints that there was something more to her than she was letting on. The possibility of her being a spy for the Scarrans has been kind of lingering in the background the entire time, and even though she’s come through an awful lot for the crew, they still don’t seem to be entirely trusting of her.

For the first time here, we get to see others of her species. And, as Noel pointed out, there appear to be contradictions in their actions and abilities compared to Sikozu’s. It is possible that they simply aren’t showing it, or that it’s something that was just sort of missed in the writing (Farscape has been known to basically forget its own rules regarding language and translator microbes on more than one occasion in the past), but what if it isn’t an oversight? What does it mean if Sikozu simply has unique abilities that nobody else of her species appears to carry? Adding to that the fact that, as Weston pointed out, she doesn’t seem concerned about contracting the disease at all, and also that we see her use an eerily familiar looking heat beam at the tail end of the episode (something she’s never used before and obviously wouldn’t have used here had the situation not been desperate) and things start getting fishy.

But what exactly does that mean? The possibility of her being a Scarran spy is still there, but if that’s what’s going on, why go to the lengths that she does to help them escape, when she could sabotage the entire thing rather easily and just hand them over. We know from last episode that the Scarrans run grotesque breeding programs with other species they have in their control to try to strengthen and cultivate extra abilities in them in the hopes of then cross-breeding them into Scarran genetics themselves. What if Sikozu is the result of one of those programs? In that case, is she more Scarran than Kalish, which gives her immunity from the plague, or is she some mash-up of even more than that?

We saw in one of the unrealized realities a version of Sikozu that was using the full extent of her abilities against the Peacekeepers for the Scarrans. Was she created with the intention of being a weapon to use against them, and our Sikozu decided she didn’t like that idea and escaped? Or, here’s a scary thought, what if she’s still a weapon waiting to be triggered that the Scarrans are just waiting for the right time to “activate” (given the mental screwery they’re capable of, a conditioned mind-controlled agent wouldn’t seem impossible)?

These are an awful lot of what-ifs and assumptions that I’m making here regarding her, but I feel like we’re very close to a payoff to the mystery that Sikozu has been, and it’s fun to guess.

And then there’s the other season-long mystery having its payoff. Harvey’s back! That sucks for John, but I have to admit that I’m thrilled to see him back in all of his wacky, warped glory. Scorpius didn’t destroy him, he just hid him from John, after reprogramming total loyalty into him and giving him the ability to upload the contents of John’s mind directly to him (not entirely sure how that works, or why if he could do that anyways that the original Harvey didn’t have that ability, but I can go with it). Interestingly enough, despite these “upgrades”, Harvey is still seemingly his own entity. For some reason, Scorpius didn’t reset him to the identical neural clone that he was when he first showed up in John’s brain, he remains a bizarre cross between Scorpius and John in his personality, and starts right off the bat with his return playing Nosferatu and being about as goofy as he can be while still menacing Crichton. I’m not sure why that is (although I’m very glad it’s the case), unless Scorpius somehow either didn’t have the means to actually “fix” him completely (given his limited resources on Moya, that’s actually likely), or thought he would be more effective as he was anyways.

Scorpius’ ultimate plans aren’t totally clear, still, but we know more about the means with which he was trying to pull them off. It wouldn’t have mattered whether or not John came to him willingly with wormhole tech, since Harvey would ensure that it got beamed straight into his head anyways. It also makes the “Aeryn and John have fake relationship issues” plot even more wallbangingly pointless.

And yet, Scorpius still holds his end of the deal with John in attempting to get Aeryn back, even though we now know that he really didn’t need to. It’s not a half-assed attempt to save face, either, at least as far as we can tell, since he does seem to go all in with it, and is the one to get himself captured in the end and nearly left behind. Of course, Harvey’s going to make sure that doesn’t actually happen, although it’ll be interesting to see John try to convince the others to turn around and go back.

On a note that’s totally unrelated to anything else, the Kalish leader reminded me of another character from somewhere, but I can’t for the life of me figure out who. It was driving me nuts the entire time I was watching the episode.

Kevin

By this point, pretty much everyone has learned how to play Xanatos Speed Chess, and it’s quite possibly the most magnificent example they’ve done yet. Crichton especially, as Weston points out. In fact, it all goes so well that for the first and only time, they are able to do exactly what they needed to do, without losing anyone.

Well, nobody they care about.

Well, nobody anyone but Sikozu cares about.

Story structure is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best ways I’ve ever heard it described was as follows: “Act One, you put the hero in a tree. Act Two, you set the tree on fire. Act Three, you get him down.” We’re still in the setup for this three-parter, which means that the characters are up a tree. Sure, they just rescued Aeryn and the bouncing half-human fetus from Scarran clutches. Sure, they got away pretty much scot-free. Sure, they only caused about half of the fatalities they usually do in these sort of things.

But then Harvey. Harvey Harvey Harvey, not only have we missed you, but we’ve missed you being an actual threat. Of course Scorpius wouldn’t actually get rid of something that might prove to be useful to him in the long run; this is a man who keeps a gun in his head.

I will repeat that. Scorpius keeps a gun in his head. Just in case he finds himself in a situation he can’t talk or menace or manipulate his way out of. And Crichton, someone who has been defined over nearly three seasons as “Not Trusting Scorpius Guy” just let him stick a needle in his brain and trusted him?

Now, as I’ve said, I don’t recall how this plays out, but it’s a bit ambiguous what Harvey’s role actually is. If Scorpius couldn’t create a mind chip that he could download remotely at his super high-tech base, how could he do so on Moya? With a box of scraps? Crichton doesn’t think it’s possible, but the entire season-and-a-half has been about how Scarrans Should Not Get Wormholes. Scarrans getting wormholes would be bad. If there’s even a chance that Harvey is telling the truth about that, no matter how ridiculously small it might be, the galaxy is frelled. Not just frelled, but mega-duplo-super-ultra frelled with a side of fried parents. To ignore this threat would be to doom the universe to Scarran rule, something that Einstein was very clear would be of the very not good.

Regardless, the flames are catching, and the tree is starting to smell like smoke.

As Aeryn is tortured under Scarran hands for the knowledge she possesses, Crichton searches throughout the multiverse for any clues for her location.

Kevin

I know this is going to sound strange coming right after I said that I love the previous episode utterly and completely, but I think the pseudo-two-parter nature of “Constellation” and “Prayer” works to its detriment. Noel and I debated briefly about whether the slow pacing of “Constellation” was an acceptable break from tension or grinding the narrative to a halt, and while I still come down on the acceptable break side for “Constellation”, combining it with this episode puts me firmly in Noel’s camp.

Gorgeous juxtaposition and framing aside, these episodes are five pounds of storytelling in a ten pound bag. The scenes in “Prayer” are drawn-out and often feel like filler, even though every single one of them is important to the overarching narrative. The spinning through the wormhole was overdone and made me dizzy, the continued spinning afterwards was pushing the bit too far, the double-exposure whatsis they used made no sense (yes, it’s an “unrealized” reality, but the last time we were there I didn’t feel like I was watching Vigo’s ascension all over again), and the Aeryn torture scenes were too far past the appropriate point. Yes, she’s lying. Yes, we know she’s lying. Yes, we know what lengths she’ll go to when protecting the toy surprise and waiting for Crichton to come rescue her. Continuing to show flashes of Crichton in her recollection of her Assassination/Mercenary Backstory for too long was unnecessary, a repeated reminder of a foregone conclusion.

It’s especially frustrating coming off the heels of quite possibly the best-paced episode in the series. I mean, I love what they were able to do with “Prayer”. Showing Aeryn not only holding on very tightly to the hope that Crichton will find her, but pushing aside the “Damsel in Distress” crap that would have been extremely against her character and keeping herself strong and in control. That’s the Aeryn Sun we know and love.

How, then, to fix pacing problems? Would it be as easy as combining the previous two episodes into one? It might not be an exact 1:1 ratio, but I’m sure that some streamlining can happen. As it is, it feels to me like an excellent pair of stories that got stretched into an entire episode, possibly because they already had their four-part season finale coming up and needed to fill some space.

I don’t know. I’m having trouble finding things to talk about, because I really did like this episode, conceptually and in partial execution. The side-along view of the wormhole was probably one of the most beautiful bits of CGI since the disintegrating Leviathan, the worldbuilding exposition on Scarran breeding projects and their mobile laboratories, not to mention the agony on Crichton’s face as he has to kill yet another person who looks like Aeryn absolutely slaughtered me. But it was cheapened by the overall framing. It’s the opposite of the situation Noel had last week; he wanted to hate the episode, but the delivery floored him. I want to like this episode, but the framing and the delivery knocks it down for me.

Notes:

I’ll need to watch it again to find out, but did Starkozu’s eyes turn black after shepherding Chiaeryn’s soul, or were they black all along?

Starkozu comes off as much less crazy and more broken and vulnerable. I’m not sure if it’s through the acting or if it’s just a double-standard view I’m taking as Paul Goddard is bigger and broader than Raelee Hill. Also, Starkozu’s cuter when she’s frantic.

If Starkozu has to love the soul, when did she love a Scarran enough to cross it over?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Claudia Black can act rings around pretty much everybody on this show. That’s not disparaging their performance, it’s just that hers is that good.

Seriously, that wormhole shot’s my favorite of anything ever.

Noel

“Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought or why we died. No, all that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important. Valor pleases you, Crom, so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen… then to hell with you!”

That quote is pretty much the A-Plot of this episode in a nutshell as Aeryn is tortured for info on John, on Wormholes, and, when it’s discovered she’s pregnant, the identity of the father, all in the universe’s Worst Maternity Ward Ever, with stirrup chairs and unsterilized needles and sobbing fellow mothers who watch as their babies are microwaved in their bellies as they gradually collect what drugs they can for an eventual attempt at suicide. This is the world that surrounds Aeryn now, where she’s suddenly more useful to the Scarrans because now they not only have a prisoner to crack, but they have John’s wormhole knowledge ready and waiting to be handwaviumed out of the fetal DNA.

So she prays. She digs up an old Sebacean deity from the time before the Peacekeepers would have likely stamped such a thing out, and she prays to it in the faint hope that something might come. And when it doesn’t, she damns the god that she never really believed in to begin with as it’s no longer about hoping for rescue, it’s about keeping her baby alive. This thread of the episode is a might predictable, with the interrogations and the other woman actually turning out to be a spy and the good cop pretty much failing to hide that she’s a bad cop, too, but it works. There just such a nightmare quality to things, an unrelenting atmosphere of hellish plans for Aeryn and her child that it’s hard not to be swept up in things. And we finally know that John is, indeed, the father. There was the man from Aeryn’s past, yes, but DNA shows the father isn’t Sebacean. We learn of another man from Aeryn’s time off ship, but he’s revealed to be a lie. There is only John. This is an answer not only to us, but to Aeryn herself, who has been struggling with the question and a way to resolve it, and I’m betting this is NOT the way she was hoping to do so. It’s a great story and Claudia Black nails it with every glare of determination, even when it’s betrayed by a tear streaking down her cheek.

And, yet, she does ultimately sell out, striking her own Faustian vow, much like John in the thread I’ll discuss below. I don’t usually like to play the “what if” game about ways to rewrite a story, because it’s done, it can’t be changed, and it comes off sounding like I’m blaming the writers for not having the same ideas I did. I’ve spent a little time in a writers room and know how chaotic it can be with everyone throwing plots left and right and how the most amazing of ideas can refuse to materialize until it’s too late to do anything with them. So this isn’t really a criticism, just an idea that kept floating into my head as the episode played out. The B-Plot, where everyone is scrambling to find and rescue Aeryn… what if that took place in Aeryn’s mind. Not as a hallucination, but as her hope, as the dreams that keep her going in the time between torture sessions, as the faith that John will be the big damn hero and triumphantly come to her rescue. And as time goes by, and the rescue doesn’t happen, she starts to lose that hope and it’s replaced by a fear that he won’t get to her, that he’ll die, that he’ll just keep looking but never finding. And when she’s at that lowest point, instead of breaking, she goes into full-on badass Aeryn Peacekeeper mode, snapping the spy’s neck and vowing, that if John can’t make it all the way to her, then she’ll do everything in her power to meet him half way.

That’s the Aeryn I was expecting in this episode, but never ultimately got. Sure, she took out the spy, but she gave up her secrets and remains locked away, with no plan to push forward beyond a promise to strike whatever deal she needs to, which whomever she can, to keep her baby alive. I guess that’s what they were ultimately trying to say, that this is such an overwhelming force that there’s no realistic way she can do anything about it but stay alive. And I guess I can’t hold it against them because this, ultimately, isn’t about clinging to hope, but rather about losing it. She loses her hope. She stops praying to gods, stops waiting for John. She vows to do anything she can to get out of here. But there’s nothing. No option for her to exploit. It is a damned good harrowing note to end the A-Plot on.

Which brings us to the B-plot.

The spinning the spinning the spinning the spinning DEAR DJANCAZ-BRU STOP THE FRELLING SPINNING! Just because the thread has the recurring image of John and Scorpius flushing themselves down a cosmic toilet bowl doesn’t mean we need to fully experience the point of view of a turd.

As for the story, I’ve expressed my loathing of the Unrealized Realities in the past, and all this episode does is enforce said hatred.

First, John being able to will himself through wormholes. Why is this something John can do that others can’t? Does having the wormhole knowledge in his brain mean his brain has itself been re-wired in some way that gives it a connection to wormholes? Does having another mind in the pod affect this navigational ability? That one might be so, as they first go the wrong way. And why is Scorpius, who has a long-standing obsession with wormholes, essentially scoffing and rolling his eyes at a fist-hand demonstration of how one successfully navigates them? He should be fascinated by every move and observation John is making, taking note of them and filing them away for the chance he’ll one day get to soar through the vortex of his dreams.

I thought the only way to create a scrambled reality was entering reality at a point before you left. Okay, that (kinda) explains how he ended up on a ship where every member of the cast but him is playing dressup as one another, but this episode clearly drops him at a point in time before when he was originally there. So wouldn’t that cause a new scramble that makes his goals all that much harder to achieve? Wouldn’t that create a new Unrealized Reality instead of dropping him in the same one he’s already been to?

And I’m still banging my head that a huge plot development hinges on the notion that, in a reality where all of the characters are suddenly played by different people and things have been tossed around in a blender, that the location of a secret hidden Scarran prison – which is spacebound and potentially mobile – will most certainly be in the same location in our reality that it is here. Are they trying to suggest that everyone is how they are simply because they’re close to John? Because that’s bullshit. For them to be this way, they would have to have been born this way, and that would mean the changes track all the way back to their homeworlds, cycles before they met John, and the genetic ancestry of their parents. The entire universe would have to be tossed in a blender from the point of its inception for the ship to turn out the way it has, not just these few people. So, no, don’t you dare try to tell me that it’s all okay because this one orbital prison complex will be in exactly the same spot in a different reality.

What I do like about this plot thread is how it takes the idea of John making a deal with the devil and runs it to the hilt. After their nastily delicious blood pact, Scorpius is literally the demon on John’s shoulder throughout the entire episode, taking him on a nightmare journey where John is forced to turn a version of his friends, his family, the people he’s shared a home and a life with for years now, into a sacrifice to win a service from an angel (Starkozu) and give the demon what he needs to fulfil his half of the bargain. Sure, Scorpius actually kills two versus John’s one, but John is forced to pull a gun on D’Argo (well, J’oolgo) and shoot down his best friend. And then, in order to find the Aeryn he loves, he has to aim a gun at an alternate Aeryn, wearing the skin of another of his closest friends and…. no, he just can’t pull the trigger. Thi isn’t an obvious impostor like the bioroid from two episodes ago. This is an actual being, a living, breathing, innocent combination of two people he’s extremely close to. But he’s already made the deal with the devil, so there’s Scorpius using John’s own hand to finalize the dirty deed. And John is left watching Chiaeryn bleeding out and dying for no reason than to settle the mystery of a single word.

It’s freakin’ harrowing and, yeah, Claudia Black plays the alternate role to such an amazing degree that, I hate to say it, even Gigi Edgley can no longer claim to be the best person who’s ever played her character. The pain, the betrayal, the confusion, the anger, the ebbing life on that face, in those eyes, through that pip squeaking voice… it floored me.

But, no, I couldn’t buy the premise that led up to it. It’s asking too much from me and is building on foundations that I’ve already argued against the stability of. This doesn’t change my mind. This doesn’t win me around and finally sell me on the Unrealized Realities concept. It merely enforced the doubts and criticisms I’ve already expressed. Yeah, the journey to the dark side with a devil on your shoulder aspect is great, but not like this. Not this way. It just plain doesn’t work for me.

This a mixed bag of an episode. Both plots have their gut punches, but one descent into the dark side works far better than the other. Maybe it’s because Aeryn’s feels far more real and in the moment, whereas John’s is almost a metaphysical parable through an imaginary bizarro land. One has weight, the other does not. But one single truth does manage to unite both: Claudia Black is frelling amazing.

Weston

This is Aeryn’s “Nerve” episode. She’s in enemy hands, unreachable by the folks on Moya. Tortured. Alone. Stuck in a twisted metal chair with a madman and his female assistant. Her mind is being plucked apart, her only solace is another prisoner who has a desperate plan to escape.

And yet it’s Crichton who’s spinning around in circles. What the hell.

Alright, checking off the points on my list that the guys already hit:

Yes, I am contractually obligated to use the word “amazing” twice per episode why do you ask?

Aeryn’s own Faustian deal.

Unrealized realities – need a full couple paragraphs for.

Somewhere, the Cubs are winning the World Series.

Okay. I think the point in time that Crichton wormholes to is somewhere after “Out of Their Minds” but before “Nerve”, and they’ve somehow picked up Sikozu along the way. Maybe the small change that occurred in this reality was a small deflection in the knife’s path in “A Bug’s Life”, which would have prevented Crichton and Scorpius from ever crossing paths. Something like that could have kept the series in a space chase format for another couple years, with innumerable changes along the way. No neural clone, no Crais running off on Talyn (unless Talyn was captured by the Peacekeepers *shiver*), a whole slew of different conflicts and resolutions. I suggest “Out of Their Minds” as a branching point because of the body-switching thing, but NamTar could have had a hand.

Yes, I’ve put this theory forward before. It’s relevant now.

The only changes in this universe derive directly from what was altered. The Sun still moves in its orbit (assuming it hasn’t been eaten by a wormhole), Crais is still a jerk, and Katratzi is still a hidden Scarran forward base. Such ripples as Crichton’s pebble have created are insufficient to move a small moon. …unless other!Crichton used a wormhole to eat the moon. Which would be a fairly big ripple.

In short: I disagree on the believability of the unrealized reality concept, but agree that it does have issues. One universe ceasing to exist while Crichton is traipsing around in one that’s very similar is a hell of a way to do parallel worlds. Somewhere in that universe is another pathetic Crichton living out another potential life, and it’s a shame we don’t see him. Gunning down Nana Pygels, D’Ool, and Chianeryn takes a huge toll on Crichton. The last enemy he shot was that giant spider – it’s been all friendly fire ever since.

Scorpius actually uses the term mind rape in reference to what the Scarrans will do to Aeryn. Given his history with them, he knows exactly what she’ll be going through. The genetic incubation program on that ship is a parallel to the program that produced him. Crossbreeding Scarrans with other species to introduce their strengths into the genepool. You have to ask: How many other species have they assimilated in this way? Which of their strengths are natural, and which taken from others? Is that the difference between the long-face Scarrans and the royals?

Aeryn has none of her cool here. None of her quiet, calm badassery. All that’s left after repeated interrogations, heat probes, and drug injections is the strength at her core. Absolute determination, the resolve to survive, and the strength to protect her child; pure Aeryn.

Aeryn is on a Scarran ore freighter – the kind of ship that Moya has been imitating for three episodes now. Is that ironic, or a heartbreaking coincidence? I lean towards the latter.

Back in season one, the producers wanted to get Claudia Black into actual training with real Australian commandos – it never happened, unfortunately, and it may show a bit in the flashbacks. For all her badassitude, melee combat is not her strong point. Related flashback note: Does anyone else think Letchner looks a little like Quentin Tarantino? It’s our first look at what she was doing between seasons three and four, and it doesn’t say much.

When Aeryn’s talking about Djancaz-Bru, I cannot help but think that she is a capricious deity. Incidentally, all of the external shots of the alternate Moya are from “Look at the Princess”.

I haven’t even seen Conan and that quote was going through my head during this episode.

This is another one of those episodes that I don’t really know how I feel about. The guys pretty much covered everything in this one already, and I’m not really sure what else to say. Doesn’t help that I’m doing this right before bed and therefore my brain is a little mushy.

I’m not going to rehash the wormhole argument yet again, because I wouldn’t be saying anything new, but I’m in total agreement with Noel on the “unrealized reality” front. No, it doesn’t matter if we can pin down when in the timeline this alternate universe is supposed to be at, because the underlying point is that there are obviously massive differences at play here in the universe. To assume that the only consequence is that everyone’s race and gender has been mixed up and that everything else is otherwise the same is a ridiculously risky gamble. I have no doubt it will pan out, of course, since just about everything involving this plot thread has totally hand-waved things that should have astronomically low chances to work the way they do.

Was it just me, or did the prisoner who turned out to be a Scarran spy flat out admit to being a spy halfway through the episode? I don’t know if the intention was that she was supposed to be telling Aeryn what she used to do in order to try to gain her trust, but since she turned out to be a spy anyways, why not make up something less suspicious? Maybe it was intentional, and she was slipping up only to have Aeryn grab hold of that thread to unravel the whole thing.

Overall, this episode had some incredible acting (both of Claudia Black’s roles in this one are stellar), a strong basic plot with very strong moments, but it stumbles over clumsy pacing and flawed concepts. I liked it in spite of that, but I really hope this final arc to the season (and series!) picks up next episode.

“Sikozu Shanu?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“A reasonable interpretation of the word ‘no’.”
“Katratzi. It’s the name of a place, the place where they took Aeryn.”
“As stupid as you must think them, the Scarrans have managed to build one of the most extensive empires in the galaxy in part, and I shall repeat this because it does not seem to sink in, by not advertising the location of their secret bases.”

In which the crew tries in vain to locate Aeryn Sun, and Crichton watches TV.

Tessa

Okay, let’s get this part out of the way: There are some god awful attempts at American accents in this episode.

This is an interesting episode to try to talk about, especially on the heels of the last one. Where last episode was packed with so many substantial plot developments from beginning to end, in this one effectively nothing happens until it’s minutes away from being over. Not only that, but it’s an episode where the focus isn’t really even on the main characters themselves, but rather on people we’ve never met and will likely never see again talking about those characters. It’s a character driven episode where the characters aren’t doing the driving. It’s just people talking about the characters and having discussions about who they are and what they’ve done. And who wants to waste time with something like that, right?

…

…oh wait, I just got it.

Joking aside, it’s an incredibly interesting view to take. The meat of this episode is, plot-wise, the unimportant bit, basically a television special where a bunch of talking heads give their spins and opinions on the Moya crew, their actions, their motivations, and what the whole thing means for Earth. It’s played up as rather unflattering at first (and overall, it does seem to have a more negative spin on it than a good one), and John certainly comes to his own conclusions about it fairly quickly, but actually watching it, it’s a fairly mixed bag, and I really like that about it. There are of course, negative reactions to the crew’s arrival, but there are also some very positive ones, occasionally from the same people. I really already touched on the idea of Earth’s reception to them a few episodes back, and it still applies here. It’s not an enlightened welcome of the advanced alien people, it’s not the cynical xenophobic imprisonment and experimentation angle, it’s just… people, reacting in all the various ways that people might react. The crew (including and especially Crichton) isn’t particularly impressed with it, and dismisses it and humanity as just ignorant idiots, but I don’t think that actually does the range of personalities and opinions in the show justice.

It’s also interesting to get insights to the characters we’ve been following for so long through the lens of total strangers, ones who have no context for who these people actually are. They aren’t all particularly well founded, but some of them are very neat little observations of the characters (and, usually them in relation to us as a species). While that’s interesting in its own right, there’s barely anything else of any relevance to the plot going on in this episode. Even the character insights we get through the show aren’t really anything we didn’t already know about the characters, and after all the momentum that built up last episode, to suddenly screech to a halt and basically watch a news special is a bit of an off-putting shifting of gears.

As far as that goes, Crichton has Sikozu and Pilot looking everywhere they can for a base called Katratzi, which Sikozu mentioned hearing the Scarrans refer to, but neither seems to have any luck finding out anything about it. Chricton swears up and down he’s heard of it before now, and, whether due to lack of sleep or his brain starting to bend under the pressure of the situation again, begins hearing Aeryn telling him about the base in the tape he’s watching. After agonizing over it for a while and finally pulling a gun on Sikozu, accusing her of lying to him, it suddenly hits him that the place where he heard the name of the base before was in one of the alternate realities. He has Pilot turn back around and head for the wormhole they used to get to Earth, and then goes off to sell his soul to the devil to get Aeryn back. He finally cuts the deal with Scorpius: if he helps John save Aeryn, he’ll hand over the secrets of wormhole technology.

All in all, I have a hard time deciding whether or not I like this episode. It’s one that’s definitely worth existing, and I guess my biggest complaint just comes down to the placement of it. The majority of this episode would have fit in far better immediately following the crew leaving Earth. There, it would have been a final bit of reflection on the impact the crew had by showing up on Earth, and could have stood on its own a little better. Following last episode, though, it almost feels like an obstacle in the way of building up to the climax for the season.

Kevin

One of the minor underlying themes of this series is what Earth would think of the new Crichton and his friends. Crichton’s own fears were explored in the first season, he was debating whether or not he’d ever make it home anyway in Season Two, he was preparing Aeryn to come back with him in Season Three…

I’ve talked before about how Crichton’s grown past Earth, how he no longer fits in groundside. Yes, he missed his home, his family, his friends. Yes, he always wants to go back. But he discovered back then that he no longer belonged there, that he already knew too much to live comfortably back with a backwater civilization.

Similarly, we as the audience have grown past this. We no longer want to see Crichton on Earth. Yes, we’ve wanted him to go home for three and a half years, we’ve been terrified that he might never have the chance to go back, and we’ve rooted for him teaching Aeryn English in preparation for the event.

What’s great about this episode, however, is that we get to see this from the other end. Not only is Crichton uncomfortable with staying on Earth, but Earth is uncomfortable with Crichton. Humanity isn’t prepared to be part of the galactic community, to withstand an occupation force, to accept the differences in other species because we haven’t yet accepted the differences within ourselves. The disparate voices and viewpoints here are especially telling; the scientific minds (including the psychologist who correctly diagnoses Crichton’s PTSD for what it is without knowing the full details behind it) and the spiritual and religious leaders have a wonderful dichotomy, not only between their viewpoints but even amongst themselves, debating endlessly about whether or not the aliens are enough like us to be understood, or dangerous and unknown and bringing with them discord and strife. Even the ever awesome Olivia (I’d love to have a sister like that) defends Crichton and his friends while at the same time acknowledging that they’re not human and thus cannot be judged by our own social dynamics and laws.

This, of course, is where the brilliance comes in. Through showing us Farscape through the eyes of familiar human social dynamics and dissenting opinions, we’re forced to acknowledge that we ourselves, the Audience and observers, have changed right there alongside Crichton. We too have gone irrevocably through the looking glass to be able to fit comfortably in this world. We have seen too much, we know the terrible and wonderful secrets of the universe. Our own society is now more alien to us than the giant with the tentacles and the gunsword, or the hypersexual grey chick, or the arrogant and insufferable know-it-all who also can walk on walls.

It is true that all stories have the audience taken on a journey, right alongside the primary protagonists, but it’s often assumed that once the story is over, when the book has been closed and the television turned off, that the story remains on its pages. As most of us who are writers and avid readers, who are able to shut out the world and grow alongside our favorite characters, we know that sentiment is false. All stories affect us, all experiences shape us, and Farscape joins the select few that actually call attention to this.

There are two quotes from Isaac Asimov that I’ve held with me for many years, which I believe is the lesson this episode is trying to impart.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Society cannot stagnate if it is to proceed. Crichton has brought change, and it is now up to Earth to rise to the challenge. If Earth stagnates, it will fall – literally, under the heels of Scarrans or Nebari or Peacekeepers or anyone else who wants to take it over. If Earth comes together and faces what’s to come, it will grow and expand and maybe one day join that conglomerate of races in the Uncharted Territories.

But this is not that story. That’s the story that we’ve left behind, at the same time that Crichton did.

This episode was slowly paced, filmed in a disjointed manner, and made heavy use of an in-universe televised documentary. It is quite possible the best thing that the series needed at this point, a breather episode after the hard-hitting revelation that the Scarrans have Aeryn and also are poised to take over the galaxy. Crichton’s dwelling on his loss and thus focusing on the past, trying to reclaim a sense of self that he had lost long ago. He’s kicking himself for the reactions of Earth, and trying to piece together the puzzle that he knows he can figure out even if it’s not complete, because he’s got all the corners and an edge and a bright splotch of color that he can use to start working on the picture itself.

He doesn’t know where Aeryn is, but thanks to the video and that very human determination, he knows where to start looking.

My notes this episode:

I will agree with Tessa that the impact of the documentary would have been better if it was immediately after “Terra Firma“, but the documentary is only a vehicle for the real meat of the episode. Having it after Aeryn’s lost gives him something to search through to try to find her, and it works from that angle, at least.

I know it came later, but all I could think about during this episode was the “Under the Hood” featurette that I purchased seperate from Watchmen. Same documentary style, same perspective, and it’s a format that really lets you sit back and pick things apart from the outside.

Even though I picked up the Director’s Cut which was supposed to have “Under The Hood” and the pirate thing not only attached but interspersed throughout the movie as it was in the comic. This is what was advertised to me and the reason I shelled out for the Director’s Cut… only to get a flyer inside the case advertising the Ultimate Edition which had this feature.

No, I’m not still bitter.

Crichton found out about Katratzi from Alternate!Stark. Does this mean Stark is coming back? As I’ve said, this is the only season I hadn’t seen first-run, so I honestly don’t know.

Weston’s probably laughing at me right now.

Every single one of the Specialist Interviews was familiar and recognizable as a legitimate viewpoint. Sure, they’re flanderized a bit, but not so much that you can’t see it for what it is. They’re believeable reactions, and that’s what’s important.

Though the Secret Service guy takes the cake.

Agreeing with Tessa here, there were a LOT of really bad American accents. But Crichton gives us really bad accents when he’s trying for something, so it balances out.

Noel

It’s been no secret that this season has had a share of episodes that pissed me right the frell off. I want to be pissed off at this episode, too.

I want to be pissed off at the awkward placement of the story. Yes, Kevin, a dramatic breather makes for a good drawing out of tension. No, following up a huge cliffhanger with an episode of Crichton kicking back and watching tv is not a way that feels satisfying because it doesn’t draw out that tension. It grinds everything to a halt. It’s not a pause, it’s not a breath, it’s a full on distraction. Remember the three–partfinale of Season 1, which had a fourth episode that had nothing to do with the others dropped smack in the middle? Remember the huge cliffhanger at the end of that season, where John and D’Argo are floating in space and heavens, whatever shall they do to survive oh wait they’ve already been safe and sound by the time we get to the Season 2 premiere so never mind lets move on? This feels like that. This feels like they needed filler, so they dropped this idea in there. It doesn’t fit. Yeah, it would have fit after “Terra Firma” – or, actually, before it, following the Dateline-esque special with what really happened (which would be a more interesting sidestep for an episode than Back to the Future) – but it doesn’t work for me here. Also, if we’re going to talk season structure, do we really need an episode of Crichton watching as humans reminisce about him just six episodes after Crichton watched as humans reminisced about him?

I want to be pissed at the completely random instigator of the story, that Pilot just so happens to catch this signal through the wormhole which everyone is close to again despite a number of starbursts into Tormented Space (neigh of horses).

I want to be pissed that Crichton is just sitting around, watching tv, brooding and glaring, instead of diving into the problem in full on wormhole obsession mode. Why isn’t he dancing over all the possibilities, hitting every planet and back alley snitch he can scurry up, instead of just gellin’ while Sikozu makes phone calls? Crichton is one of the most proactive people in the universe, so it never sells to have him intentionally become inactive. Remember when he first met Sikozu, after he’d been stranded with nothing but a dying Leviathan to keep him alive? Despite massive limitations, he kept working the problems and moving forward every inch he could. Here, he doesn’t do a damn thing until he offers a deal to Scorpius.

I want to be pissed that they best they can do to make the pointless “Unrealized Reality” relevant is to have a random word uttered by Starkozu suddenly play a key plot point that doesn’t even really mean anything because A) Stark isn’t here, and B), even if he was, you’re gambling he knows everything the he from an alternate universe knew and that Katrazi is even in the same place in both realities. Bullshit. This is desperate, lazy plotting, especially for this late in the game.

I want to be so very pissed off at this episode….

But I can’t be.

Why? Because, dammit, it’s really well made. Alien Visitation is a hysterical show that comes off as all too true in terms of how the world – or, at least, America – would respond to the impression the visitors left behind. I love the variety of faces and personalities. I love the way they laugh one moment, make a sharp philosophical point the next, and give a rich, spot on overview of each of the main characters one after the other. It’s perfect how they take innocent claims and turn them into either dangerous declarations or deep insights. Our heroes warn the planet about how vulnerable they are, which creates the divided reaction of “Thank you for this wakeup call!” and “I know you are but what am I!” It’s bravado. It’s ego. It’s exactly the mindset that would have led to Rygel on a dissection table. It’s painful. It’s amusing. It’s real. It’s frelling honest.

I made a big speech at the end of Season 1 about how Farscape excels at being honest, and by golly, they continue to prove it. This is how us we humans would react. And, yet, when Rygel says:

It’s a backward planet, full of superstitious, xenophobic morons. Nothing makes sense if they didn’t think of it first.”

One could also take that and apply it to members of pretty much every race we’ve seen on this show, himself included, and especially the entirety of the Peacekeepers. And then there’s Aeryn’s more grounded, but equally apt, claim that we’re all the same, really. It doesn’t matter what color your skin is or if you have tentacles instead of hair or if your skeleton is on the outside. People are people. There is no humanity vs. alienity. It’s all one and the same when you get down to it.

This episode has many deeply frustrating elements about it, but I can’t deny that I enjoy watching it. There is a sloppiness greasing up the edges and making it hard to hold on to, but the central point it’s making and many of the ways in which it does so keeps me holding onto that frame as tight as I can and refusing to let it drop away.

Weston

Ah, hell, you guys. This is the episode that has the final scenes that were shot for the series. The bonus features on the disc have the full videos that Bobby shot, the final wrap, and the Save Farscape campaign. David Kemper’s final speech is solid – he takes a few swings at the Star Trek franchise and particularly Nemesis, and fairly. He takes a few extremely valid shots at Sci-Fi Channel, which replaced Farscape with the short-lived Tremors series and some other show from Showtime I’d never heard of.

I appear to have feelings on this subject. I will try to hold on to them for the finale. In six weeks. *sob*

So, this episode takes place several months after Moya left Earth. With only three episodes between then and now, I suppose this has to be explained by wormhole instability. We also know that Bobby took a hundred and twenty hours of home video while the aliens were around – mathing that out, making a few assumptions, we can get a rough estimate of how long they were on Earth. It kinda surprises me that they hung around as long as they did.

Noel properly hammers Rygel for his evaluation of humanity.

I love the musical transition from the Alien Visitation theme into the Farscape credits.

We learn that Crichton is the youngest of three children, with two sisters. We met Olivia in “Terra Firma”, and I don’t believe we’ve seen Bobby’s mother. This episode has a ton of Bobby, though, and he’s fairly fantastic.

Short paragraphs this week. Unfortunate. Appear to have ensaddened myself by reminiscing over the end of Farscape. Compensating.

D’Argo regrets the amount of killing he’s used Lo’La for. Between him and Crichton it’s become a running theme this season, though it does run slightly counter to his “I love shooting things” bit.

The giant TV uses TAPES. Actual magnetic TAPES. That’s, like, two generations of media ago! And this episode is only nine years old! The TV itself uses a big honking cathode ray tube! How did they fit that through the landing bay doors?! Man, no wonder Sikozu is so disdainful.

Noranti’s hair is absolutely amazing in the rat poison scene. Chiana may not like makeup, but Noranti has sure gotten into it. Unfortunately, a rat later gets into the poison, and Chiana finds it. That scene… man. Poor Chi.

The Alien Visitation experts are… well, they’re speculating in an expert fashion. The retired general believes that Noranti has never killed, and it’s probably for the best that he doesn’t know she tried to kill Crichton. She technically succeeded that one time. The sociologist seizes on her comment that humans never give up while skipping over how boneheaded it is. Two experts note that Chiana’s outlook is anti-materialist and sophisticated. The monk and the psychologist unknowingly comment on Ka Jothee, the latter is closer to the truth. She then makes a similarly striking analysis of Sikozu, calling her full of anger and disdain.

Sikozu needs a paragraph. She’s got a good heart, but it’s ruled by her head. She recognizes the sacrifices that others have made for her, but has trouble doing the same. Her self-preservation instinct is so strong that it has, on most occasions, overrode her apparent moral center. It’s there, but buried deep. She does seem to have a stronger connection to Aeryn than to any of the others, maybe that’ll strengthen the moral core. On the flip side, the amount of suspicion she’s been getting from the crew may push her the other way.

Olivia recognizes the tension between Crichton and Aeryn. So did Caroline. Heck, it seems that the only person in the neighborhood who doesn’t see it is Scorpius. Maybe he has, but chooses not to exploit it. Could be his motives really are benign.

D’Argo seems to have picked up a little bit of Latin along with the English. “Ad nauseum”, indeed. Maybe something Crichton said that the translator microbes didn’t catch?

Sheriff Schumacher returns, and he’s been carving pumpkins for eighteen years. Poor guy obsessed over the alien invaders to the point that he was institutionalized.

Chiana talks sex with Bobby. Many good points in that conversation. She’s only two thesaurus jumps away from using the word “prostitots”.

So much of this season’s arc story seems to show up in the last five minutes of each episode. This one is no different, culminating in Crichton’s faustian deal with Scorpius. An even trade: Aeryn for wormholes. Our boy John is so desperate to get Aeryn back that he’ll trade a planet-destroying weapon.

Most notable? Scorpius doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to. His eyes show suspicion; after all, Crichton’s offered him wormholes before. The music says everything he doesn’t.

Amusingly, during the credits, we get an ad for Alien Visitation in the style of Sci-Fi’s “next time” previews. I don’t like that style of credit-squishing, especially when the music carrying the show out is so fantastic.

“Luxans are warriors, not diplomats. They are a liability to our peace efforts.”
“So you would just abandon them?”
“Yes. For the greater good.”

In which Ladies Night Out is crashed by the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans. The hangover is head-splitting.

Weston

Okay, first things first: Look at that hat. That is a magnificent hat. It’s half as tall as M’Leero-NARaxilMrs. Ben Browder War Minister Akhna, and she wears it well. That’s the kind of hat that says “Don’t hover over me. Or stand behind me. Or beside me, in case I want to turn my head a little bit. In fact, don’t stand anywhere near me.” It completely fits the War Minister’s personality.

The meet with the black marketeer goes about as well as anyone could have expected; money exchanges hands, Moya’s sensor module is handed over for upgrade, and the ladies find themselves with four hours to kill and a handful of tokens to spend at the various illicit booths. Then, in an astonishingly fortuitous coincidence, Peacekeepers show up. Not all that many, but Marauder commandos are notoriously dangerous. Then a similar number of Scarrans arrive, and we learn that they’re holding a clandestine meeting to prevent a war. That the only thing preventing this war is Grayza’s bluff that the Peacekeepers have wormhole weapons based on the destruction of one Dreadnaught. And that she’s willing to cede Luxan territory to the Scarrans to avoid total war.

Wormhole weapons… wormhole weapons… where have I heard of them in context with Grayza before? Oh yeah, when she shut down the project. Peacekeeper Command could be using actual wormhole weapons by now if they hadn’t jumped that particular gun. Ignoring, for the moment, John Crichton’s hand in the matter; he wouldn’t have had Scorpius breathing down his neck if Grayza hadn’t been hovering over the Carrier like a black cloud. So now Commandant Mele-On Grayza’s only weapon against the Scarrans is a high modified Charisma score and a bluff check. Well played, Commandant. Well played.

The Scarrans, of course, have none of it. Akhna signs Grayza’s treaty, then immediately betrays her. There’s something to be said for bringing an invincible walking tank to a meeting that limits the number of participants. Seriously, unless the Peacekeepers develop an infantry-level weapon that can neutralize/disable/kill a Scarran, any attempt to land troops on a Scarran world would be suicide. The Peacekeepers have no such weapon at this time, so all four commandos and poor Braca go down like sacks of potatoes. Grayza doesn’t even put up a fight, knowing that she has the Constitution score of a slice of cheesecake.

Grayza is thrown into a big sarcophagus of some kind, and Braca just has to chill while handcuffed to some pipes. Poor Braca doesn’t rate a sarcophagus. Three Charrids come in, two of them shoot the third, and surprise! It’s Aeryn and Sikozu! Who are about two seconds away from obliterating both Grayza and poor Braca (who’s trying to tell Aeryn that he’s still on Scorpius’ side, which is marginally better) when Grayza points out that she can annul the treaty she just signed. The ladies go along with it, running into the final Charrid and that damnable walking tank.

Exit, pursued by a Scarran.

There’s a subplot about Chiana wandering around doing Chiana things and getting a massage from a shapeshifting masseuse. Genetic chimerization, engine signature modifications, deep tissue massage, all the wonders a hard-to-find black market can offer. Noranti gets in on the fun while the two are evading Peacekeeper detection, and the two flirt a bit while Braca jabs them for genetic samples, but it’s largely pointless. I’d chew out Braca for using genetic tracing in a black market that specializes in genetic manipulation, but he’s actively sabotaging Grayza’s efforts.

Aeryn and Sikozu both recognize the sound of a Scarran Stryker. Aeryn, I can understand, but Sikozu? What experience does she have with Scarran warships?

Without a Crichton around to generate a Crichton Plan, Aeryn comes up with one: Assassinate Grayza, run away quickly. As such plans go, it’s a little heavier on the premeditation, and almost as successful.

So. Our heroes manage to escape, having both acquired the sensor distorter and disrupted the Peacekeeper/Scarran summit. They make it back to Moya, reunite with the boys, and Starburst away from the pursuing Dreadnaught. Except that isn’t the end of it. The Dreadnaught remains in hot pursuit, and since Starburst is untraceable it’s deduced that the ladies must have brought back a homing beacon. Several minutes of frantic searching produce nothing, and the crew is beginning to discuss splitting up when Crichton notices something off about Aeryn. She doesn’t know about the baby. She doesn’t know English anymore. Long moments of confrontation lead to the conclusion that this is not Aeryn.

And Crichton shoots not!Aeryn in the head.

That’s gotta be traumatic. Maybe it’s not Aeryn, but it sure looks like her, and our boy John just shot it in the face. Sikozu convinces the Dreadnaught to move along, but the damage is done. Aeryn’s gone. She’s somewhere else, maybe back on the dead Leviathan, maybe somewhere else entirely by now. Scarran Strykers are the fastest thing in space, and she’s on one with two merciless lizards who don’t know her from a commando.

This is another one of those episodes that’s just stuffed full of things going on. The entire thing felt longer than a normal episode, and not in a bad way, because there was something substantial going on almost the entire time.

It’s interesting that we go from an episode that barely features the girls in the crew to one that focuses on them entirely and leaves the boys back on the ship. It was kind of fun getting to see them hold their own in the adventuring, although similar to last episode, I’m not sure I get why the separation across gender lines is happening. At least with Katoya, there was the possibility that he was just “sexist martial arts guy”. There’s no conceivable reason why the guys all stay behind with this one, though. Don’t get me wrong, the two groups of crew members work perfectly well on their own, I just don’t totally understand where the decision to split the crew in that way came from.

Oh god, Rekka’s hair. His HAIR. I’m at a loss for how to make fun of it, because there are SO MANY options. The man looks like a Whoville resident trying to cosplay Doctor Wily and not quite getting it right (I was all set to make a dorky reference complete with a link to something, but I’m spoiled for choice on that front also. Not that it’ll stop me from trying). The crew makes a deal with him to modify their Tachyon Capacitor Sensor Modulator so that Moya can pull the moon out of its orbit evade long-range sensor scans. After a bit of haggling, they reach an agreement, which of course nobody trusts Wily and his cohort to uphold their end of, so Chiana follows him so that she can keep an eye on him. Of course, he immediately vanishes because he’s a ninja he’s a ninja.

I like that up until this point, this episode totally looks like it’ll be about the crew trying to keep from getting screwed over by these guys, until the Peacekeepers and Scarrans show up and the entire thing veers off in another direction entirely. And, in the end, it turns out that, as opportunistic and slimy as the two are, their end of the deal was genuine and they pull through with it, even moving to protect the transport pod from would-be thieves (unfortunately, said “thief” is Chiana, but the point is that their intention is genuine). The part appears to work fine, and the homing beacon wasn’t put there by the two of them. There’s all the buildup to the two not being trustworthy and anticipation of them betraying the girls, but in the end the only thing they’re actually guilty of is having goofy hair.

I’m cool with Sikozu being able to recognize a Scarran ship and the sounds it makes. Between her growing up in Scarran territories and her ability to quickly analyze and memorize things like languages, it’s not that far fetched that she would be able to distinguish between ships. Plus, it adds to the paranoia fuel that she still just might be a Scarran spy after all (which gets played with when she comes under suspicion as the one who brought the beacon aboard, something that of course turns out to be not the case).

It’s almost a little easy to overlook just how massive the developments of this episode outside of the main characters involvement with them in the chaos towards the end. The Scarrans now have a signed treaty giving them the “right” to the Luxan territories, and, quite possibly, a Grayza clone that will back up their claims (assuming, of course, that Grayza was in the machine long enough, which is kind of up in the air). And, failing that, the Scarrans are totally ready to call the Peacekeeper’s bluff on wormhole weapons and ignite all out war. Stuff appears to be about to go down very quickly from here.

And, of course, Aeryn is now captured by the Scarrans, which means that the crew can’t run from the conflict now even if they were inclined to do so before. The worst part is, knowing about their cloning technology, if and when Aeryn shows up again, we now have to worry about it being another clone. And, of course, there’s no real guarantee that she’s even still alive to be found and rescued again (she probably is). The absolutely crushed look on John’s face as all this is sinking in is heartbreaking.

We’re pretty quickly approaching the end of the season (and series!), and it looks like an awful lot is going to start happening. I’m excited!

Kevin

In terms of execution, this episode is absolutely brilliant. As Tessa said, it seems like there’s so much going on here, but in all actuality it’s only got two plot threads. The A-plot seems like it’s going to be the upgraded Chameleon Circuit for Moya and the difficulties in acquiring it (plus it always seems to get stick on a 1963 blue police box for some reason). Though the prominant storyline for much of the beginning (in quite possibly one of the longest or at least more involved cold opens I’ve seen in a while), it is actually the B-plot, relegated to the wacky background antics of Chiana and Nana Peepers, because the A-plot quickly appears and absolutely dominates the rest of the episode.

We’re clearly in the final arc of the season (and indeed, the series itself). Crichton’s gone home and found he no longer belongs there. Aeryn’s pregnant and they’re back together. D’Argo’s not only found (and lost) his son, but he’s also finally resolved his issues with the death of Lo’Laan. Things are starting to wrap up, questions are being answered, and on the horizon looms the escalation of the growing conflict between the Sebaceans and the Scarrans. It’s been a cold war for the past few seasons, but the events of this episode may well be the spark that transforms it into full-out Peacekeeper Wars (available now where DVDs are sold!).

As simplistic as the episode structure may be – two plots, clear conflicts, simple resolution – the real genius lies in the pacing. The writing and direction of this episode is, quite frankly, some of the most flawless I’ve seen in some time. The twists were subtle but not overpowering – Tessa knocked it out of the park with the interaction between Chiana and the Emerald City Gatekeeper being surprisingly clear-cut and non-exploitative for Farscape – the dialogue was snappy and engaging, and even the visuals were wonderfully executed. The transitions between plot threads are nearly seamless, with Braca being sent to find Crichton’s shipmates (but only coming across a Blue Chiana and a lesbian Ferengi), thus increasing the pressure on the need for the cloaking device.

Artistically speaking, this is my favorite episode of the season thus far. I mentioned the visuals, and Farscape does love to play with rich colors and deep blacks, but what I really think took the cake here was the set design. They were able to save money on building all new sets simply by tossing a green filter on the floodlights and turning the fog machines on overdrive, and what used to be Moya’s interior became a whole new concept of a Leviathan that maybe saw the greatest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation ever and it kinda sorta didn’t work out. The Farscape team must have been taking lessons from the BBC in making the most of a limited budget, and it definitely shows. The dead Leviathan is creepy, distorted, and certainly not the same place we know and love. Hell, even the fan room they built specifically for this season got a redress and reuse.

And it works.

Notes!

There’s a lot of continuity coming into play here. The Scarrans believe that the Peacekeepers were the ones to take down their dreadnought with a wormhole weapon, and the Peacekeepers are only too happy to let them continue thinking that. Noranti’s out of her usual mind-bending dusts because she keeps using them on everybody. Aeryn’s becoming more and more Crichton-like in her plans. Sikozu can speak Scarran and now everybody else knows that. Braca’s trying to undermine Commandant Cleavage without being obvious, as Weston pointed out. The Luxan treaty from the end of Season Three. Going back all the way to the beginning of the entire series, the Peacekeepers want more authority and expansion into the Uncharted Territories.

Chiana looks good in blue.

Did anyone else love the fakeout they did at the physical/genetic therapy shack? I thought the Matron and Audrey would turn out to be our friend Doctor Robotnik As A Used Car Salesman And Also On The Atkins Diet, and I was floored when they weren’t.

Speaking of our friend Dilbert’s Manager, he did screw them over by taking all of Chiana’s money when she was tied up, but they still got the work done and I’m pretty sure that was much less than four arns. But you know what they say about the service industry, always pad your time and if they don’t challenge it, they deserve the increased labor costs.

Seriously, a simple redress of the set is amazingly effective. Especially all the times they show us empty Pilots Dens. With no Pilots in them, it’s FAR CREEPIER. It was creepy on Talyn, it was creepy when they picked up Sikozu, it was creepy on the Eversion Moyas…

Hindsight subtlety note here. Go back and watch when the girls get back to Moya, and Not!Aeryn and Crichton share a moment with Scorpius right outside. Crichton has to “remind” her they’re trying to keep their relationship under wraps. She doesn’t know this. She also doesn’t know English or the baby. We’re pretty sure the Scarrans made the switch when Aeryn charged forward on her own, so either A: they could make a bioloid REALLY FAST with an imperfect memory, or the even scarier B: they had an Aeryn copy all along. And were waiting until the perfect moment to swap her.

…I just gave myself chills.

Noel

That hat. Lord, how I love that hat. I totally want a codpiece of that hat that I can wear everywhere I go just so I can give myself a false reason for why I’ll never get laid. Or I’ll just wait for the day I can purchase my own black market bioloid… of Makeover Noranti… with Weston’s beard…… oh, yeah, that’s daddy’s happy thought…

So, the episode. As has been said, there a hell of a lot going on here, but the others have also pretty much said everything that can be said, so let’s see what I can find to say…

This being an all girls show does feel a bit more forced than the last one being an all boys show, but I like how they acknowledge the gimmick by putting them back to back. It’s also a nice way to shake up the cast a little. We’ve seen all those boys play together – with the exception of some of their interactions with Scorpius – but we haven’t had many scenes where it’s just Aeryn and Sikozu or just Chiana and Noranti. Some interesting dynamics come into play, especially in that second pair, which is a shipping couple I never thought of until now, and am suddenly all for.

Kevin, I don’t think Sikozu is revealing anything by speaking Scarran, since she doesn’t do so until D’Argo prompts her. I get the sense his scowl afterwards is more from his distrust of what she said than the fact she can say it. And Weston, as Tessa pointed out, Sikozu is from Scarran territories, so it makes perfect sense that she’d know what their vessels sound like.

The look of the entire series often reminds me of schlock masterpiece Alien from L.A., but this episode more than any other. I bet it’s the feathered eyebrows. And Chiana has always sounded a bit like Kathy Ireland.

I love the two little mohawks on the side of the dude’s head. I keep imagining his head lifting up off of his body and flying away.

I love that John almost has to psych himself up in his confrontation of Not Aeryn by literally forcing himself into a bit of his trademark madness, going off on gibberish swaps of baby and beacon, and challenging her with the alphabet. Real Aeryn would have kept up with him, but all Not Aeryn can do is stare.

I… really don’t have anything else to say. The others nailed it. I love the subterfuge, the way the team works together while at each others’ throats, the way a mundane back alley scum plot takes on epic proportions as an unexpected deal suddenly goes down, Francesca Buller playing her fourth – and longest running – character, Scorpius scrambling to get the distorter in place, Braca trying not to be killed by the side he’s on while trying to avoid betraying his allegiances to the side he’s pretending to be on, and Grayza being Grayza. It’s a fantastic episode and a great way to start kicking things into the final arc.

“He’s trapped in a coma with his own nightmares. Killing him would have been merciful. I’m not that enlightened.”

In order to find out more about the Mantis Lady that accompanied them to Earth, Scorpius schedules a Boys’ Night Out. This goes over about as well as expected.

Noel

This is the episode that reminds us of D’Argo’s hyperrage. He’s had his grumpy moments in the last two seasons, but he’s mostly been collected, mellow, even goofy at times, and it’s been a long time since we’ve seen him full-on Hulk out his anger, tearing a room up, roaring out gibberish curses and spittle, being filmed in blurry motion, and attacking anything in sight, even those he’s closest to. I’m trying to remember when we saw it last, because it’s been so long that it comes as a complete surprise here. This is the man who’s recently been voted captain of the ship, and the moment he sees the man he believes killed his wife, he’s out of his seat and ready to kill. It’s a little random to have Macton Tal suddenly show up in Tormented Space (*scream of horses*), as one would expect D’Argo to actively hunt the man down at some point, but the beginning of the season took a stray path like that off the table rather quick, so this is the best way the could come up with to get the two adversaries together. It’s a minor quibble. Creative license. I’ll give it to them.

It’s so perfectly executed with the way they remind us viewers of the rage and violence D’Argo has the potential to erupt into, then gives us a spin on his long standing origin which paints him as his wife’s killer, unknowingly abusing her and ultimately taking her life in a series of blackout rage fits brought on by her family’s hate of her choice of partner. It’s one thing for a man to confront the mortal foe he’s spent years chasing, it’s another for the mortal foe to pull the rug out from everyone and turn the savior into the guilty, the protector into the monster. They play Macton Tal with just the right level of understatement so that he could be telling the truth. And given what we see and remember of D’Argo, it’s not something that’s beyond him. If there’s any small weakness there, it’s that they spend so much time convincing D’Argo he wasn’t as gentle with Lo’La as he remembered, only to reveal, nope, it’s all a lie and he wasn’t guilty of anything. I’m not saying I want her to actually have been killed by his hand, but some lingering shame of genuine violence could fuel his new goal of complete self-control far more vividly than an illusion of it. That said, domestic abuse, even (arguably) unintentional, is a bitter thing to ask an audience to accept and empathize with, so I guess I can see why they didn’t want to go that far. As it is, it’s still a strong story that comes out of nowhere and reignites the depths I was starting to forget were buried within the lovable Luxan lug.

Much of this episode comes out of nowhere. The entire trigger is the crew’s attempt to track down info on the creature that attacked Crichton and his family on Earth. Which brings us to Katoya, the one-eyed pain Jedi who, instead of bartering his info for money or supplies, forces the men of the crew (no ladies allowed in the pain classes? Is it too easy for them, being the tougher sex and all? You heard me, buster!) to partake in Lament Configuration Mortal Kombat where they enter a virtual reality plane of degraded arenas, bottomless pits, or smoky shadows and try to focus their own pain and increase their opponents torment through a flaming polygonal thingie that zips back and forth between them. Yeah, it sounds silly, but it works, especially when Rygel kicks a Charrid’s ass. The point of the game, and other challenges in Katoya’s dojo, is to learn control, to not give into pain, because pain likely stands alongside fear as a mindkiller. In order to think and focus through pain, you have to be willing to experience it. As Crichton learns when he’s locked in an oven box and eventually forced to dig into searing grates and smoldering coals with his bare hands to get the key to his freedom.

And the other big twist is how Scorpius is involved. It’s gradually revealed that he and Katoyan are old acquaintances, and that Scorpius brought the crew here so Crichton could learn to withstand Scarran heat mind rays, just as he himself once did. Scorpius has been the epitome of self control so far in the series, and now we meet the man who gave him that power, and who wants to further lessons so Scorpius wouldn’t even need a coolant suit in order to function. It’s a shame, then, that John Brumpton’s performance as Katoya is really quite flat. They try to spice it up with him doing weird head things to compensate for the single eye, but he comes off too dry and stoned to be all that memorable. And how, when he’s a master Jedi who can fling people to their asses without even touching them, is Macton Tal able to casually sneak up and kill him in the VR chair?

This is a damn good episode. I had a few nitpicks here and there, but frell ’em. The setting is strange and interesting, there’s surprising revelations about our main cast as they’re put through a series of genuinely challenging tests, and D’Argo continues to show why he’s the man.

Weston

This really is a difficult episode to write about, and I can’t quite put my finger on why that is. Maybe it’s how short it feels – compared to “Terra Firma”, it seems brief. We spend most of the last fifteen minutes in D’Argo’s head, with brief intermissions to see how Crichton’s doing in The Box. Everything takes place on five sets: Katoya’s icosohedron (big D20) chamber, the mess hall, Lo’Laan’s house, and two Moya locations.

Those two scenes on Moya are pretty powerful. Aeryn and John cuddling in Pilot’s Den, conspiring with the guy who controls the comms to get together behind Scorpius’ back. When was the last time we saw them happy together? “Daedalus Demands“? Any bets on how long this reunion will last? The other Moya scene, Macton chaining D’Argo; man, that’s rough. All through the first three seasons, D’Argo emphasized that he would not be imprisoned again, and now Macton has chained him inside his own mind. It shows how much he’s changed over the series that he no longer sees himself as a former prisoner.

D’Argo married too young. This is a danger with any couple, but Luxans and hyperrage? Ooof. I want to see how these two met, and I really want to see an unrealized reality in which they meet twenty years later instead. Calm D’Argo, mature Lo’Laan, absent Macton. Maybe it would have worked out. Or maybe they would have been tossed into a blender and Macton would have wound up with D’Argo’s face.

As long as I’m running down scenes by location: Lo’Laan’s house. Goddamn, but that was brutal. Killing someone reflexively in self defense is unfortunate, but understandable. Beating the warm corpse of your own sister to an unrecognizable mess? That’s approaching Crichton levels of madness-inducing action.

Crichton. Yeah, I’ll get to him in a minute.

First, Katoya. Dang. Why do Scorpius’ major affiliations only show up towards the end of a season? Scorpius himself in season one, Natira in season two, his childhood in (the middle of) season three, and now this guy in season four. His iron self-control, revealed last episode to not be his strongest trait, came not only from his upbringing on the Dreadnaught but also from this guy. Katoya’s line that Scorpius could live without the coolant suit, given sufficient training? Terrifying. A stronger Scorpius is exactly what the universe doesn’t need. …or, considering his goals and motivations…? No. That’s too much end justifying the means.

The icosahedron could have been Scorpius’ inspiration for the Aurora chair. I wonder if Katoya needs the device, or if he just puts people into it so they can play against each other. He certainly observes D’Argo in the light and fog chamber without difficulty.

Now, Katoya and Crichton. Dropping our boy into a hot box until he pushes through the pain to achieve his goal? Cruel. Perhaps necessarily so, but it’s a hell of a thing to do to someone. The lesson learned is, perhaps, nothing new to Crichton. It does revive a bit of his season two mindset, remind us that he’s got a propensity for stupid ideas and the willpower to see them through. He does, however, gain a few points of heat acclimation. Totally useful if/when the Scarrans show up again.

Rygel on the Charrid: Owned. But it knocks Rygel out for the rest of the episode. Unfortunate. I can just see him hovering over the oubliette with a key asking what Crichton will pay for it.

D’Argo said at the beginning of season four (in a deleted scene, it still counts) that he’d chosen a more subtle revenge against Macton Tal, that he’d just sent a message indicating that he knew where Macton was and that he was coming. This episode is Macton’s retort. Maybe the Peacekeeper took off for the most remote location he could think of, or maybe he was looking for D’Argo.

Scorpy’s three favors: You know that he was planning to bring Crichton here for a long while, and the green meanie was just a good excuse. Hell, I’ll be he knows four other people that could identify the Skreeth, and half of them are on that dead Leviathan the ladies took off to.

The video quality drops significantly during the Macton/D’Argo confrontation. I thought it might be intentional, dropping back to the season one style of shooting, until I saw a frame that still had the timing across the bottom. That’s just ridiculously poor editing.

Close enough.

In conclusion, I don’t know how Macton kills Katoya either. This is why you always work with a spotter; so that no one sneaks up behind you while you’re diving into someone else’s brain.

Tessa

Oh, D’Argo. It’s been too long since you were the center of attention in an episode, and boy, did this episode remind me why I love it when the narrative decides to turn towards you for a character study.

I agree with the others that it’s really tricky to get thoughts in order on this one, because so much is going on. First off, I kind of wish that deleted scene Weston mentioned hadn’t been deleted, because that covers the one problem I had with this episode. Without that bit of information, it seems fairly random that Macton would be in Tormented Space, this ~horrifying~ place that nobody ever goes to until our heroes run there and then everyone else suddenly shows up there too. But, with the added context that D’Argo let Macton know that he knew where he was? It makes a bit more sense that Macton would get scared and go running for a place he wouldn’t be expecting to be found, and even more sense that he would be seeking out training from Takuma Sakazaki1Fish-head Obi-Wan Kenobi Katoya in preparation for the eventuality that D’Argo did find him. It’s still a pretty big coincidence that the two wind up in the exact same class, but it’s an easier one to swallow in context.

I have no idea why Katoya’s dojo is a boys-only club. I can only assume that Katoya himself is kind of sexist that way (which, “no women allowed” martial arts masters aren’t exactly unheard of even now, in pop culture or in real life), since it’s never commented on one way or another.

Anthony Simcoe does some fantastic acting, but that’s nothing new. Still, with the revisiting of the hyper-rage concept and D’Argo’s battle of will to control it, there’s some really great moments in there. Ben Browder has some great ones also in the heat cage (which, ow, by the way), but D’Argo’s the character really on display here.

I love the ambiguity at play in this episode regarding Macton and D’Argo’s past. We really don’t know for the majority of the episode what really did happen. We took D’Argo’s version of events that we were told about all the way back in season one as the truth for so long, that suddenly having it play out as a little more complicated than we thought at first is really interesting. In the end, it’s a mixed bag. D’Argo didn’t kill his wife, intentionally or otherwise, but we learn that he did during hyper-rage blackouts, hit her, presumably on more than one occasion, a fact which she kept hidden from him. While Macton is still a racist bastard, his position as a concerned brother suddenly gains some legitimacy after that reveal, and the lines become sufficiently blurred to the point of not being able to know for certain what happened anymore. I really like that Macton, who had been villified for basically the entire series, becomes a bit more grey now that we’ve actually met him in person. He seems like a total arrogant monster on first glance, but under the surface, he’s a scared, guilt-ridden man who has to live with the knowledge that he not only killed his sister, but brutally beat her corpse. I kind of wonder if his sneering insistence that D’Argo is the guilty party, the monster who can’t control his violent tendencies, is just as much him trying to convince himself that his lies are the truth to cover his own guilt as they are to torment D’Argo. I almost feel bad for him in his ultimate fate, living out the horror of his crime repeatedly, the look of absolute pain on his face as he beats an imaginary Lo’Laan. It’s a fate he’s fully deserving of, especially considering the fact that he just attempted to inflict the same fate on D’Argo himself, but it’s not as cut and dried as simply “he’s a Peacekeeper, ergo, he’s evil”. You can see the steps that led to what ultimately transpired.

I do kind of love that D’Argo effectively has a shoulder angel and devil in the forms of Katoya and Rygel throughout the episode. Katoya insists that D’Argo can control his anger and hatred of Macton, while Rygel repeatedly tells D’Argo to just kill the man and be done with it. Crichton, somewhat amusingly, stays incredibly neutral in the whole thing, being a pillar of support for D’Argo as always, but not really having any input on whether Macton should live or die.

The guys already went over the Scorpius angle pretty well, but just as a sidenote, a more detailed backstory of Scorpius leading up to his first appearance in Season 1 would be a really awesome spin-off series, in really any medium. I’d love to read or watch his whole story, which just gets more and more interesting the more we learn of his past, what he’s been through, and who he’s known.

All in all, I loved this episode. It’s a really great means to tie up what’s been something of a loose end in the series in regards to D’Argo’s overall story.

Noel referenced Mortal Kombat, I had to respond in kind with my own reference to my favored fighting game series. And really, I was hearing “Ko-ou ken!” in my head the entire time the glowy orange pain ball was being passed around. But then, I’m a shameless fangirl.

Kevin

You know what’s interesting about this episode? Not just fascinating, or cool, or thought-provoking. No, what’s absolutely the very most interesting part of this episode is this: What is Scorpius planning?

No, seriously. What is Scorpius planning? We have no idea. It’s been a mystery ever since his original plan went pear-shaped. He disappeared, seemingly dead, his drive and passion completely gone, then returns – on Moya, no less! – and has a new fire, a new reason to continue existing. He claims that Crichton is part of this, and… that’s it.

Crichton doesn’t trust him. Ever. He plays along, sure, but he is always cautious when Scorpius is involved. The others have varying degrees of a similar attitude, save for Aeryn (who up until recently was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt) and Sikozu (who we’re all pretty sure is frelling him blind at this point).

So what do we know? We know he’s planning something about Crichton. We know Sikozu factors in somehow. We know, thanks to this week’s episode, that it involves Anti-Scarran Training, with assurances that he’ll need to use it at some point.

That’s what I love about this storyarc. Not only is Crichton in the dark here, but so are we. We’re left with rampant speculation and paranoia, which Scorpius is a master at manipulating. It keeps things tense, because we don’t know what he’s going to do.

All we know is that he’ll look damn good doing it.

Notes!

Maybe Macton snuck up on his blind side?

How interesting would it have been if D’Argo had actually been the murderer? I know it goes against everything we believe about his character, but it might have brought up some great moral dynamics. For example, is hyperrage truly an excuse? Would he be completely culpable if he can’t remember it? What else might he have done against his own will, a slave to his own physiology?

Of course, that could also have very easily turned into a massive angst fest. Maybe we’re better off not having gone that path.

Did anyone else get Maldis vibes off the mental training? Or was that just me?

I want to turn one of the rooms in my future house into a psychedelic starry-sky trippy light room.

“I know you can see me. Bad guys always see me. My plans suck. People die. It’s always a mess.”

In the unglorious return to Tormented Space, Our Heroes barter for some maps to survive… and an extra, unexpected purchase, as well.

Kevin

Ah, the glorious return to mindfrell. We know this because even Crichton says it. It can be looked at as a resolution to open questions, or as simply a return to the strange/zany/frelled-up madness of everyday Moya life, but one thing is for certain, I expect this episode to be a bit polarizing. Since I already know what Tessa’s thoughts on some of these things are (I get to see her reactions first-hand), I’ll go ahead and say that I liked where this episode went, in pretty much every way.

First off, I love it when the A-plot of an episode is merely a metaphor for what’s really going on, and when the B-plot is actually the more important foreground element here. So too is the story of The Amazing Spider-Girl, “rescued” from the traders that she actually controlled and killed, who is now running amok on Moya. The point of this plot is not the girl, nor is it the spider, but her rather ingenius method of drawing out the most prominent trait of a person – the driving force of their spirit, if you will – and then harvesting it when it’s at its peak. Having been with these characters for nearly four years now, we recognize it right away as it’s heightened and then removed: D’Argo’s rage, Rygel’s greed, Chiana’s sexuality, Aeryn’s confidence, and Crichton’s determination. Each of those may not be the only defining characteristic of Our Heroes, but they’re important enough to leave them practically helpless without it. It’s especially interesting that Scorpius’s defining attribute is not his Magnificent Bastardry, since he slips into more of a Scarran CRUSHKILLDESTROY before he’s harvested. Rather, his Magnificent Bastardry and cool exterior is what he uses to suppress his Scarran side, and the knowledge that it’s the more dominant side is, frankly, terrifying.

But consider Crichton’s. His determination, his resolve to never give up ever ever ever. It’s not very surprising to us, but it’s a nice nod to what we already know about him. But even in his self-defeatist attitude, we’re told a very foreshadowy hint about the John/Aeryn B-plot, the arc that’s been plaguing us since the beginning of this season. When his determination is taken away, one of the first things he does is complain that he’s losing Aeryn, that he has already lost her, that they’ll never get their back. But wait! Before Spider-Girl came on board, he was going around saying… that he’s losing Aeryn, that he already lost her, that they’ll never get their relationship back.

It’s enough to make the final revelation – that he’s been intentionally trying to forget Aeryn and push her away, rather than reacting poorly to the situation – less of an ass-pull and more of a defining moment. And you know what? As wrong or right as we want to believe his actions were, they’re at least partially justified in that he’s doing it to prevent Scorpius from getting to him through Aeryn and the baby. Because that’s what he’s afraid of most. And we don’t know if he’s right about it, nor do we know anything beyond Scorpius A: having plans for Crichton and B: tapping the comms, apparently, but Crichton is completely right to be afraid of this.

This is the Scorpius that held him and tortured him for little reasons other than “That guy looks unfamiliar, let’s see what he knows about wormholes”. This is the Scorpius that hunted him for two seasons, coming very close to capturing him many times, and who effortlessly toyed with him half the time. This is the Scorpius who would kill everyone on Moya, in a heartbeat, if doing so would somehow cripple the Scarrans.

Crichton may be paranoid, but I can’t blame him. I don’t know if he’s right about Scorpius, but he’s right to be concerned that it might happen. Batman’s superpower is paranoia after all, and look where it’s gotten him (i.e. Not Dead Yet).

Notes for this episode:

I actually had trouble locking down exactly what Aeryn’s dominant trait was, before settling on “confidence”. I was thinking, “Calm? Sebacean superiority? No, those don’t quite work…” But confidence fits her to a T. Confidence in herself, in her own abilities, in her team/squad/shipmates/family…

Nana Peepers in Badass Granny Combat Mode! Noranti is awesome, and it took me until this rewatch to understand that. First run around, where I kept missing episodes of the third season and most of the fourth, all these new characters confused and annoyed me, so it’s refreshing to be able to grow with them naturally.

Sikozu is certainly turning into more and more of a mystery. Detachable limbs we already knew, but she’s immune to Spider-Girl’s harvesting? What other secrets does she have?

Poor Chiana. Always getting the shaft (usually because she’s not getting the shaft). And she means well, too.

What do you mean, “But you brought the Vorc”? The Vorc did what it was supposed to!

Oh, Tormented Space. One day we may find out why you’re so Tormented. Apparently you need radiation shielding, and now maps.

Noel

This week’s episode is about a giant spider that eats peoples’ personalities. And after she’s defeated, our heroes cook her up as spider soup and eat her. You’re welcome, Tessa!

It’s always fun when the creators decide to mess with the entire crew in strange ways, from making them go insane, to having them play dress up as one another, to giving them a Freaky Friday to spend in one anothers’ bodies. Here we get something similar, but it feels deeper than the usual air of shenanigans as it cuts straight to the heart of who these people have come to define themselves as over the course of the show. As the most defining characteristic of each of the characters is exaggerated by Talikaa, they almost become parodies of themselves, with D’Argo going angry commander, John increasingly driven to push forward and give everyone guidance, Rygel pulling such a massively simple swindle that he could screw up the entire ship’s ability to function in tormented space (which I refuse to capitalize until it earns it), and Chiana so horny you could hang coats on her. And then the show takes a huge turn by taking these things away. We see Aeryn as hyper and panicky, her stability no longer there to focus and guide her. We see D’Argo as pacifistic and meek. We see Rygel as charitable and Chiana as sexless. And John can hardly get himself to stand up and move, to the point where he’s just laughing as he asks the villain to kill him and she says no. And, yet, the heroes triumph. They’re an absolute wreck without the things that make themselves themselves, but they still function, and without their individual quirks, they’re actually better able to focus on the immediate situation without getting distracted. As themselves +10, they were unable to function. As themselves -10, they pull together and sort things out. Even John, crushed and mojoless as he is, still confronts the evil, gives the others leadership, and saves the day.

As for the rest of the cast, with Noranti dismissed as too old to be worth eating or seen as a threat, she rises to the occasion and uses her own skewed way of seeing the world to give the others clarity. Scorpius is trapped in his heightened self the longest, his suppressed traits heightened to the point where they look ready to rip out of his body. Once they’re done making him violently spew and roar, of course. Sikozu is not only immune to the creature, but she’s young, making her a threat, so she’s disabled with Talikaa unaware that torn off limbs can simply be reattached. Talikaa makes a point to say that she herself is absolutely ruthless, so I wonder if, that being a key trait of Sikozu’s character, there’s nothing there for Talikaa to consume that she doesn’t already have.

This is an episode all about relationships. We clearly see the bond that’s been forged between Sikozu and Scorpius as he races to her injured side, pledging death to whoever’s responsible and barely quelling his rapidly building Scarran monstrosity to help tend to her wounds. Chiana throws herself at a disinterested John yet again (with no callback to her having deflowered him back in the day, once again rendering that episode largely meaningless), then has a moment where she physically tests her desires on D’Argo, only to find them completely dead. I know his obvious arousal is played for laughs, but it’s nice to see a fleeting connection between these two again after how strained their relationship has been for quite some time now. And then there’s John and Aeryn. He’s been whiffing poppers to forget her. She found out and is disgusted, betrayed, and left wondering why she even continues to bother. And then he drops the bombshell that puts the entire season up to this point in a new perspective. Yes, he does still love her. No, he hasn’t been trying to forget her. He’s been trying to suppress things so Scorpius won’t have any ammunition to hold over John. We all know Scorpius isn’t going to turn over a new leaf like Crais did, and it’s starting to sink in to our characters that, though they’ve given him free movement around the ship and occasionally accept his guidance, he is not to be trusted. At all. I love the moment where Aeryn starts to dismiss John’s claims as paranoia, only for Scorpius to play his hand exactly the way John expected him to.

This is a solid episode, with a cleverly written script that could have been gimmicky, but instead feels very authentic to the characters and richly developed. My only issues are that Talikaa looks way too much like Snooki from Jersey Shore, which isn’t a fair complaint as this predates that, but it was stuck in my head nonetheless, and that Rygel screwing over the ruling power in this sector of space is fully resolved instead of creating lingering consequences that haunt the crew for episodes to come. Don’t get me wrong, there’s technically no way it could as the resolution of that plot is fully necessary given the rules established throughout the story, but it would have been a fun angle to explore.

Three last points, then it’s off to Weston:

1) John not only kills the villain, HE EATS HER!!! Hell, the whole crew serves her up as soup. Sure, she was a monster, but unlike the past beast they stuck on a spit and roasted up, she was a sentient life form. I’m a little surprised they took it there.

2) This is the first of two episodes in this final season which were written by David Peckinpah, nephew of legendary filmmaker Sam Peckinpah. David had made a good name for himself in television before this, being one of the head writers and producers behind Beauty and the Beast (the Ron Perelman one), Silk Stalkings, and Sliders. Sadly, a heart attack claimed his life at age 54. Just three years after this episode was written.

3) I totally jizzed a little at the sight of Scorpius orally splooging on his own face.

Snot funny.

Weston

I could have gone my entire life without reading that. You have scarred me again, Noel. My brain is starting to look like Zsasz.

…though it was kinda neat how the splooge dripped down into his ey- no!

First, the thing I do not like: The giant spider CGI is hideous. It is the most obvious CGI that I can recall since that time Rygel walked into the giant bug orifice. After the fantastic shots of Lo’la last episode, this is pretty glaring. Also, I can’t quite figure out how big it is. Is it a little bit smaller than D’Argo? Is it huge, with long limbs that can smack Crichton around like a rag doll? Is it a little smaller than D’Argo with really long legs? Between the two perspectives we see it in, I can’t tell.

On the subject of the spider, I wonder if it would be useful as a biological weapon. Drop a colony of these things onto a Scarran world and watch the inhabitants grow lethargic and fall over. Not as effective as a xenomorph (and wouldn’t that be a cool episode), but still efficient. Especially with that scream attack. Figure out how that works, build a speaker system to replicate it, and bam armor-piercing stun weapon that works on everything up to and including Sebacean-Scarran hybrids.

How many different creatures and/or people has Chiana brought aboard? The Vorc is the only one referenced, but there was also Maldis’ sculpture-thing and Hubero. Her track record is two of four, and that’s not half bad. To ignore the good ones reinforces the “our plans always suck” theme, but downplays the successes.

Chiana is finally pulling out of the unspecified-assault-induced state that she’s been locked into for half the season, and just in time to help a victim of unspecified-but-strongly-implied-to-be-rape. It’s taken a while, but she’s getting back to the more protective mother role that she was slipping in to towards the end of season three. She’s even the one who puts everything together, discovering that Talikaa has stolen the strengths of their various characters.

I think the spider soup that Noranti cooks up at the end is the distillate of energy orb that everyone needs to restore their mojo. The image of the Diagnosan was talking about it on the trader’s vessel. Or… y’know, on review, I’m not sure how they got the mojo back in. It says something about proximity, so I guess the neural energy just jumps back into whatever the spider siphoned it from? Odd.

I will forgive this episode for both the spider and the mojo in a bottle for the last scene. Crichton and Aeryn have been building up to this since the coin toss, since Crichton came aboard to find Aeryn and Scorpius, since he started huffing Noranti’s poppers. It is literally my favorite scene in the entire series.

Sikozu designed a new module for Scorpy’s head cooler. Not only does it turn the rod from red to blue, but it also has four rods. And spins. A significant upgrade, but does it have room for a one-shot pulse weapon?

Chiana kisses D’Argo for the first time since Jothee left. That’s fairly significant.

Noranti actually cooked something that tastes good. And people eat it. How weird is that?

I’m trying to type more, but Peacekeeper Wars is looming large over my brain. We’re almost two months away, and I’m already cringing.

Tessa

Alright, let’s get this out of the way.

I do not like this episode. At all. Sure, I like some ideas that it delves into, but the episode as a whole? Nuh uh. Not a fan.

To be absolutely fair to it, it’s not entirely the fault of the episode itself. We’ve gone into my crippling insect phobia before, and the giant spider kind of came out of nowhere and totally freaked me out, and this was one of those episodes where I didn’t actually watch half of it because my eyes were closed.

That’s actually the smaller of the two issues that I had with this episode, though, so before I go into total rant mode, let me go into the stuff that I did actually like about this episode.

The idea of the crew’s strongest trait being magnified before taken away from them completely was really cool, and I loved the insight we got on each character as a result. It wasn’t anything we didn’t already know (save for one exception, but I’ll get to that), but it was an interesting exploration of the characters regardless, and seeing them be extra-themselves only to have them become not-themselves right after was fun.

Scorpius, though, is where the really interesting bit was. His strongest trait isn’t being the cool-headed strategist and evil mastermind that we’ve come to know and love, but rather the primal raging strength of his Scarran side. Which he keeps under control at pretty much all times. That’s his strongest trait, akin to Chiana’s sexuality, D’Argo’s anger, and Rygel’s greed, and he suppresses it with sheer force of will at all times. That’s a scary level of willpower. If it doesn’t seem that impressive, imagine the others in that position. That’s like Chiana never acting on her libido ever. It’s like Crichton giving up. It’s just something you can’t see happening, and yet Scorpius does it all the time. That’s both awesome and kind of frightening given that we get hints at the end that his heel may not have turned face as much as he wants everyone to believe.

Okay. Here it is. Apologies to Weston, who just named it his favorite bit of the episode, but I hate the end scene. I literally sat there gaping at it, not believing the plot twist they just pulled at us, before straight up yelling at the screen (Kevin was there, he got to witness it first hand). Seriously?! We have this long, emotionally powerful conflict all season long between Aeryn and Crichton, two people who are crazy about each other and yet keep making stupid flubs because they’re flawed people in a string of bad situations that keep them just out of arms reach of each other, except oh wait I guess that’s just Aeryn because it was Crichton’s plan all along and he was doing it all on purpose.

No, there isn’t any need to explain it to me, I do understand the point of the plot, and it does technically work, but my god what a punch in the gut to anyone that actually got emotionally involved in this whole plot thread. It’s an unbelievably cheap way to bring that conflict to an end, and it frankly waters down the entire damn arc of this season’s look at their relationship when it turns out that all of those seemingly stupid moves Crichton was making were totally on purpose and he gets to waltz away looking like the big strong hero because he was “just doing it to protect her and the baby”.

No. Bullshit. And, not that it would make it any better, but why not just tell her what’s going on while they were on Earth? Even if we’re buying the idea that the coms get to send messages through wormholes, he could take the damn thing off and pull her into another room and be like “oh hey, I’ve been a total dick to you, it’s cool cause here’s why”. I guess the idea is that he was totally trying to break it off with her completely to “save” her (which is a trope that I absolutely despise, by the way, made even worse here because Aeryn has been established as a strong woman who can hold her own as well as if not better than Crichton), but it very obviously hasn’t been working and Aeryn’s a big girl and you can let her in on it and goddammit just grrrr.

Oh, and also? He’d better be quadrupling up on those forget-me-drugs now, because, uh, they’re gonna have to be pretty damn convincing about their “we’re broken up no really for reals” thing to not trigger Scorpius’ built-in lie detector. Somehow I doubt that would be an easy thing to pull off if they’re secretly back together now.

Moya arrives at Earth, and John is faced with the decision of what to do from there. Meanwhile, Grayza’s assassin attempts to hunt him down and take him alive.

Tessa

This is one of those episodes that is just stuffed full of plot developments. I think more substantial developments happened in this one episode than in the four prior ones combined (which, maybe not coincidentally, is the entirety of the Tormented Space bit).

Way back in the first season, we got a look at a scenario where the Moya crew arrived at Earth, contact was made, and the resulting consequences. Of course, that all turned out to be merely hypothetical, as the entire thing was a construct created by the Ancients to see whether or not Earth would be a suitable place for them to try to make a new home. Still, it gave us a chance to see how humanity might react to being made aware of the existence of alien species.

The word “might” is an important disclaimer to add to that, because in this episode, we see the same scenario play out, only this time it’s for real. And, thankfully, the resulting response is far more balanced than the example we were shown in A Human Reaction, which was skewed heavily towards the negative. Sure, the element of the government trying to keep the situation under control and the crew being effectively “caged” during their stay is still there, but instead of imprisoned on a military base and having experiments performed on them, the crew is given a place to live, and studies are happening on a much more mutual basis. You have the government angle being preoccupied with how to make use of the technology to benefit America and America alone, but it comes hand in hand with the people who are just fascinated with the situation in general and want to try to learn and understand it. The Moya crew isn’t quite welcome with open arms (strings are definitely attached), but neither are they being imprisoned and dissected. It’s a far less cynical look at humanity, and I think the episode is far better for it.

It’s really interesting that a less cynical look at humanity comes paired with the far more cynical and polarized political state of the world that Earth is in. I like how September 11 is brought up (without being overplayed, which it easily could have been), the nod to how the world has changed in Crichton’s absence, and what that means as to the concept of bringing humanity together in the larger scope of things. It’s incredibly frustrating for John, but neither he nor Jack are technically wrong in their readings of the situation. To John, of course, who has the perspective of the entire universe under his belt, Earth’s inability to come together is trivial and silly in the face of what they could potentially be facing should the Scarrans or the Peacekeepers find their way to Earth. But for Jack, especially being in the position he’s in, that’s a far bigger hurdle to overcome than John is willing to accept. The idea of not only trying to get the world to come together, but getting America to agree to try to get the world to come together, in a time where the entire country was terrified and looking to secure itself against outside forces, is a pretty big pill to have to swallow.

The crew still has bits of fish-out-of-water antics going on in this episode, but not anywhere near the extent of the last one (probably because the US Military does a far more effective job in keeping them all contained than D’Argo was able to). I love that Rygel and Noranti are both pretty much having a blast because of all of the new foods they get to experiment with, and later Noranti’s attempts at singing Christmas carols, but it’s also fitting that it’s not terribly overplayed. It’s funny without being distracting.

We keep touching on all of the actors in Farscape having great acting chops, so it feels a little redundant to do it again, but David Franklin does a great job as Braca having a green telepathy communicator dealie attached to his head and having Skreeth talk through him. I can’t tell if the voice of Skreeth is actually him or if it’s dubbed in later. If it’s him, he does a fantastic job at the voice, and if it’s not, it’s incredibly well done lip syncing. Either way, it’s impressive.

I feel like I need to say something about the Aeryn/John plot thread, but I can’t quite get a grasp on anything substantial to write about regarding it. It’s all very good, of course (and we get a very tense moment between the two where she asks for a straight answer from him only to have the mood killed by a sudden mantis lady attack), probably the best this season has had in regards to looking at their relationship. I like that Caroline is thrown into the mix, as the variable that John had seemingly forgotten all about, although aside from giving Aeryn something to have anxiety over, not a whole lot seems to come of it. Her relationship with John just seems to end off camera, without her seeming to have any strong feelings about it at all. I’m not sure that a real conflict regarding her would have fit neatly into this episode (which already had an awful lot going on in it), but as it stands she almost feels incidental, as if she’s just there to put yet another easily passed barrier between John and Aeryn, and she just cleanly disappears from the story after her conversation with Aeryn where she easily accepts that John doesn’t have feelings for her anymore.

There’s a similar bit with Laura and DK, in that although they still serve a purpose in the narrative after their deaths, disturbingly little is made of their disappearance. The implication seems to be that a bit of time has passed between their deaths and D’Argo discovering them (enough time for them to start decomposing and smelling, at least), and yet nobody seems to notice that they aren’t around anymore prior to that. John never has any reaction to his best friend’s death (there’s never even any indication that he finds out it happened), which just feels odd. The three characters dropping away with little flair might be the victim of an episode that just had too much else going on and couldn’t spare the time to fully complete their parts in the story, which is understandable, but at the same time it just feels like there’s an extra two scenes where their bits are wrapped up that should have been in this episode that weren’t.

I don’t want to dwell on this for yet another episode, but at this point I feel almost obliged to at least touch on it after making a big deal out of it in the last two. This episode is still treating the wormhole as if it’s a straight shot in between two places (which is, again, in direct contradiction to what the nature of wormholes were claimed to be two episodes back), both with Sikozu zipping back along it (totally alone, mind you) to meet up with Scorpius, as well as Scorpius’ claim that Grayza could use the wormhole to reach Crichton and thus the plan to set up the transport pods as bombs just in case. While I do appreciate that Crichton and friends overshot their return to Moya by 42 days (both for the reference, as well as in the interest of continuity of what they seem to want wormholes to be), it only muddles the situation further by them trying to have it both ways. And, as predicted, the plothole of potential time anomalies for anyone not named Crichton went ignored (it wouldn’t have fit in the episode anyways, but that’s not my point).

In the end, though, I loved this episode. It was great exploring an actual return to Earth (for once not a fake one or the Earth of the past, but an actual return), and seeing the consequences of just what it means for John to get his wish to get home. I touched on this back in the first season, but Crichton returning to Earth prior to the series’ end could really only go one of three ways. Either the series would continue, shifting its main focus to Earth, the series would leave him behind on Earth and follow the rest of the crew back into space, effectively losing him as a main character, or, as happened here, he would leave again, either by choice or design. While out of the three, the latter is the “safest” option as far as the series easily continuing goes, I like that he does make the choice to leave again rather than somehow being forced to. It let us see just how complicated his return actually was, the difficulties he had in trying to reintegrate himself back into his old life, and in the end, his accepting that despite never wanting to be a part of the larger conflicts of the universe, it’s something that he can’t ignore at this point. He’s got unfinished business out in the universe, and it’s not as easy as just stumbling back upon Earth and calling it quits anymore.

Kevin

It’s the triumphant return of D.K.! I’ve been looking forward to this for three and a half years! Hello, D.K.! …goodbye, D.K.

As I said a couple weeks ago – and as Tessa predicted back in the first season (that girl is really insightful, I don’t know whether it’s ’cause she’s just that good or the series is just formulaic enough for her to keep doing this every single time) – John Crichton has been using “Go back home” as his benchmark. Everything he did was to achieve this goal, and everything that happened to him was in response to it. Crichton popped up unannounced and killed a Peacekeeper pilot, his brother swore revenge for a full season and drove him into hiding. Trying to keep one step ahead of the Peacekeepers, Crichton infiltrates a research base, only to be captured by Scorpius and divulge that he’s exactly what they’ve been researching all this time. Through escaping Scorpius, the Scarrans (and Peacekeeper High Command) get interested in what precisely is so fascinating about this one person, and through constantly escaping those situations, Crichton has now made himself Public Enemy One. Not always through his own design, but the point remains that he is now a permanent fixation of Commandant Cleavage and the Scarran Empire.

It would have been so easy to leave this as the reason Crichton can’t stay. With the wormhole active, after all, Grayza can (and, as we can see in the middle of what I’m arbitrarily choosing as the C-plot, is preparing to) follow Crichton and wipe out his entire planet out of revenge. Especially since her Mantis Lady is sending back her impression of the technology level of humanity. Which doesn’t measure up to a full Command Carrier with Frag Cannons, multiple squadrons of Prowlers, dozens (if not hundreds) of Marauders with elite commandos who have been trained nearly since birth to be efficient, ruthless killers. It would be so easy for this to be Crichton’s reason to leave, since he needs to shut down the wormhole to prevent them coming through.

It would be so easy, if he had intended to stay all along.

You can see it in one of the other two plot threads – which, since the John/Aeryn thread is important but still background to this one, I’ll call this the A-plot – where Crichton and company are being unusually forthcoming with their culture and technology to Earth. In a post-Star Trek world, this is practically unheard of, a clear violation of the Prime Directive, but it’s also kind of necessary. Scorpius had found Earth already, and even though he destroyed that information, who’s to say that Grayza’s scientists couldn’t recreate it? We already know that she wouldn’t show the same restraint that Scorpius did, when he told Crichton that it wasn’t worth the sixty-year journey just to glass Paraguay.

To that effect, Crichton both denies D.K. and Laura the knowledge that we all know he has, about FTL and wormhole tech and how to put together a working Pulse Rifle, and also asks them leading questions and gives them just enough of a seed to work from. He doesn’t want to just give them the tech, since there wouldn’t be enough of a drive to find out how to build from it. If you give a man the answers, he won’t learn how to find them himself, and the combined scientists of Earth (now that they know that it IS possible) will be scrambling to discover how to make it themselves. And then make it better, in that creative human way. That was the point of the cryptic request for a metallurgic study of the Prowler and Lo’La, which even D.K. recognized as little more than a dangling carrot.

Had Crichton been planning on staying, he’d be doing everything he could to help Earth be ready for that assault that’s sixty years off. He’d be sharing blueprints and chemical compounds and mathematics, and working directly with the scientists instead of dropping stuff off and going off to argue with Senators Killjoy and Obfuscating Beaurocracy. Instead, he’s squeezing as much family time in as he can. He’s testing the limits of his comfort zone, which even Caroline Wallace recognizes. He’s trying to prod Earth into coming together as one, despite what America wants to do.

His shipmates already know. They don’t react with surprise when he tells them that they’ll be gone before the Senate committee figures out who gets to ride on Moya. (Well, they do, but only about his promising said journey when he had no intention of it happening.) In fact, he even makes that mention halfway through the episode, way before Mantis Lady attacks him.

Let me repeat that. He could have said that the attack was what changed his mind about staying (and probably did say that to his family), but he had made his decision well before then.

Crichton had been so concerned about going home. Now he knows he no longer belongs there. He may be a child of Earth, but he’s a man of the galaxy. He knows what’s out there, what Earth isn’t prepared for, and while he’d like to stay and help them reach that level, he needs to be out in the thick of it, making sure that nobody traces him back through that wormhole or back to that sector of space.

This episode isn’t even a turning point. It’s the point where he comes to terms with the fact that point happened a long time ago.

I loved this episode. Unabashedly, unforgivingly, unreservedly loved it. The plot threads were layered without being too much, and it didn’t drag out at any point. What questions it didn’t answer, it touched upon, and acknowledged that those questions were still in play. It gave us a bit of closure to the four-season-long story arc, and let us move on to what else is in store.

Noel

As Kevin said, there is no real arc in this episode for John, at least when it comes to his feelings for Earth. From the first time we see him on the docks, he knows he’s leaving and everything else after that is just a prolonged farewell. He sits down with his family, knowing it may never happen again. He takes a few kisses from his old flame, knowing they’ll be the last they share. I love they way he gives his people a taste of the alien tech, just enough to inspire and trigger new questions and growth, but he’ll be damned if he trusts these monkey with all the answers because, let’s be honest, they’ll be flinging it at themselves within a decade. And even if he stayed to force that growth forward as fast as it can go, would anything ultimately be done in the time it would take Grayza or the Peacekeeper or the Scarran or the Nebari to reach Earth, when everything has to clear countless tangles of bureaucracy and non-terrestrial ignorance? Making these people into fighters that can hold their own is impossible in that timeframe. As he says, the root that fuels the pulse pistols doesn’t grow here, so they’re dren out of luck on that front. No, he needs to leave and take the fight away from a world he can no longer settle into. He’s been away from the chair too long and the upholstery has degraded without him while he’s been reshaped by new experiences. He no longer fits.

To disagree with Tessa, I don’t find any loose threads in this. Sure, the girlfriend angle or D.K. could have been expanded a bit more, but, ultimately, that would have dragged things out. They aren’t the story. John being unable and unwilling to recapture his past is the story, and those elements are explored exactly as much as they need to be in order to play their parts in that story. The man she loved has returned, but he’s moved on. The friend he lost has returned, but what tagged along slaughters him and his wife. What would John’s reaction have been upon learning of D.K.’s death? He’s John. His jaw would clench, his eyes would moisten as he bores his grief into you, then he’d throw on some shades and move on, exactly like he does at the end of the episode. Speaking of which:

It looks like D.K. had a Close Encounter…

…of the deadly kind.

YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

So yeah, after a few problematic weeks, I finally have an episode that I love from start to finish. The press and politics are well handled, keeping the extras limited to those within our leads’ field of view. D’Argo gets to scare the hell out of everybody and blow something up at the end while Chiana dives head first into Terran fashion and tries to bang aging senators. Sikozu gets to play the superiority card, flustered by an incompetent, “inferior” species wanting to poke and prod her like a lab rat while Noranti and Rygel scarf down everything they can eat, whether it’s food or not. John’s family gets to show why the Crichtons are awesome folk, taking in alien beings and being as open and gently guiding as they can. The Grayza subplot pays off wonderfully with the gummy (gyah!) assassin monster thing icky ninja erupting into a surprisingly violent, destructive, entertaining climax. Sikozu and Scorpius get to sneak off for cuddles and talk of shared suicide (!). 1812 gets to be a tour guide. Braca gets to do all kinds of twitching things under a neural link. And Jack Crichton gets to show where his son got it from as he sums the episode up in a salt of the earth speech:

“I once told my son, he’d get the chance to become his own kind of hero. Well, he got it. And he made the most of it. I also taught him to stick to his guns when he thought he was right, so I can’t fault him when he does. I’ve heard it said that he should accept our judgment over his. Because he… owes us. I’ve even said it myself. We’re wrong. Look at the friends he discovered, the miracles he brought, and then ask yourself what he owes us as compared to what we owe him. Now, John insists that we share these wonders with the rest of the world, but some people are afraid of what’ll happen if we do. John’s afraid of what’ll happen if we don’t. And I’ll go with that.”

There only two problems I have with the episode, and they’re small. One, John’s cousin Bobby. His screen time is short, but damn that kid can’t act and is all kinds of annoying as he shoves his camera at the alien bikinis. Second, I know the show is shot in Australia, but was it really so hard to find some local US expat actors or maybe ship some in? The obviously forced accents work when you’re on alien worlds, but when you’re trying to sell this as America, it doesn’t work when nobody actually sounds American. Nor do they sound Australian. They’re in that weird midway point as a photo morphs into another photo where it’s become a malleable, fuzzy blob that you can just make out, but what it’s trying to be is still thoroughly held back by what it was.

And I know I’ve been harping on this for the last two weeks, but I need to say it one more time since this was the ultimate payoff of this arc. This is the last time I’ll bring it up. I swear. Unless the show brings it up again, in which case, all bets are off. Anyway, I still don’t have a single clue what the point was behind the last two episodes. They brought absolutely nothing relevant or meaningful to the table. At all. Seriously, how was anything from this episode altered by having John and Co first visit Earth in the past? Anything. Take out that episode completely (minus the Grayza planting the spy bits which, let’s be honest, could have been tagged on in any story) and tell me how it ultimately affects this episode one bit. John thinks about his mother when he sees the ring. His reaction would be entirely the same even if he hadn’t just seen her alive. The aliens are already adjusted to Earth. No, not really. Their struggles with language, custom, and what is or isn’t edible aren’t really all that strikingly different than if this had been their first time. In fact, this would be a more realistic depiction as they just roll with wherever they land like they always do instead of being completely hung up by it like in the last episode. There is nothing here that is changed by the last episode. There is nothing here that is driven by the last episode. The last episode had absolutely no reason to exist beyond someone wanting to do it for the hell of doing it. And without that episode, the one before it, the one with Einstein and Unrealized Realities is also completely pointless as it was purely setup for a side quest that ultimately had no impact on the main plot. None. Not. One. Bit.

Weston

Man, I love you guys. I’ve been looking forward to this episode for a long while, and you’ve hit all the high points.

I get the feeling that Noel is going to hate “Prayer” four episodes from now. I hope I’m wrong, but [redacted spoilers]. Flip side, I suspect that he’ll love at least part of “A Constellation of Doubt”. Predictions have been laid out, now taking bets.

I wonder what First Contact was like when the Shuttle sailed into Moya’s hangar. Two astronauts in full EVA gear hop out the airlock, wander into the maintenance bay, and there’s Sikozu speaking in fluent English with some Spanish and Klingon thrown in. That could be a fun scene. The reference to the Shuttle is a little heartbreaking, though, in light of the recent end of the program.

From the opening titles: “I’ve made enemies; powerful, dangerous. Now all I want is to find a way home. To warn Earth. Look upward and share the wonders I’ve seen.” He’s made it home, and he shows off the wonders he found in the Uncharted Territories. But the enemies come with him, and Earth learns that the universe isn’t all sweetness and light. DK finds out the hard way, as does his wife. They only get four scenes, counting the one where they’re dead. Olivia Crichton (who is awesome) thinks she’s in E.T. and finds out she’s in Alien.

This episode has the most tasteful 9/11 reference I’ve seen in any medium. One name drop, and they go straight on to dealing with the consequences. There’s a spectrum of such references: At one end we have this, and at the other is Uwe Boll.

Grayza doesn’t just rape prisoners, she has no trouble making her subordinates think she’s had her way with them. Poor Braca. He’s had enough fortitude or presence of mind to resist the rohypnosweat previously, and there’s no indication that they’ve recreated. Mind frelling is as much a tool in Grayza’s box as the regular sort.

The journal that Crichton writes in while out fishing isn’t entirely in English. It reemphasizes his otherworldliness. Earth just isn’t home anymore.

I totally think of Batwoman’s cape when I see Aeryn’s badass longcoat. Nice colors, flowing material.

Scorpius spent forty two days on a transport pod. By himself. Sitting on top of a wormhole. Plus however much time Crichton spent on present-day Earth. One wonders how he passed the time. Then Sikozu showed up, and… well.

1812 has had a stuck arm since it first showed up. A little human ingenuity, a spritz of WD40, and bam! A return to full functionality. I love that DRD.

Earth has translator microbes now. Not for everyone, but they should become widespread enough to remove some of the more severe communications issues.

Aeryn and John’s relationship is obvious to everyone. Caroline, Jack, Olivia, they all comment on the tension. Caroline recognizes it for what it is. And now Aeryn knows about Noranti’s laka poppers.

D’Argo obliterates the Skreeth. Little bit of overkill, but against something that resistant to bullets and pulse rounds Maxim 37 is in full effect.

The ongoing Farscape mission is no longer to test an atmospheric slingshot, but to explore new worlds and new civilizations. Crichton has become the Zephram Cochrane of his world. There will be a statue. It will not be a frozen Crichton.

I wonder, while Crichton’s flipping through the photo album, if all of his memories survived the brain surgery intact.

Olivia loaned books to Aeryn. I wonder what books?

I also wonder, while I am wondering about things, whether John told Jack about the things he’s faced in the Uncharted Territories. Whether Jack knew what he was going back into, about the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans and the Tabloids (Tavleks) and Charrids and all the other nasty things that go bump in the night. I tend to think no. Jack gets first hand look at what’s out there, and intuits that there’s a hell of a lot more, but John doesn’t say anything. Earth has enough to worry about getting its own act together without adding hostile star empires to the pot.

I think that’s most of… nope, one more thing. The metallurgical analysis Crichton asked for on the Prowler and Lo’la. He’s begun to suspect that Prowler Pilot Liquefaction Syndrome isn’t a characteristic of wormholes, but a result of the interaction of wormholes and Prowlers. It’s not that there’s something special about his white deathpod that lets him traverse them; there’s something special about Prowlers that prevents them from wormhole surfing.

Continuing last week’s theme: Once upon a time there was a boy named John. John’s dad died in the Challenger disaster, so he never went into the space program. Moya remained a Peacekeeper slave, Aeryn was stuck as a space Nazi, Chiana went back to Nebari Prime, Jool did a fantastic popsicle impression until someone needed her organs, Sikozu got ate by a Brindis Hound, and Scorpius continued to be a magnificent badass. Then someone set a fake fire, bonked Jack Crichton on the head, banged young John in the back of a four by, and set events more or less back on course.

The previous episode’s cliffhanger left John Crichton, wormhole bodysurfer, in a fairly low Earth orbit. Over Earth. Earth, our poor hero’s prime motivation, his obsession ever since he got lost four years ago. He made it back. And now he’s going to burn up on entry because he can’t surf atmosphere like he can wormholes. At least his ashes will be scattered over his homeworld.

Everyone gets the chance to practice English while they’re on Earth. Aeryn’s is stilted but understandable. Chiana’s consists of maybe twenty nouns and verbs. Noranti is damn near fluent somehow. Rygel can say “graaaagh!” and steal candy from children. And D’Argo knows three phrases, none of which are helpful. It’s a fun twist. Translator microbes are literally everywhere in the civilized galaxy, and these people who have never had to take a language diversity course to get through college are now dropped in the one place in the universe that they don’t exist. It seems a perfect opportunity for Sikozu to show off, but she’s back on Moya keeping Scorpius company.

Scorpius and Braca. Man, these two. Braca is revealed to be the spy that’s been reporting on Grayza’s actions to Scorpius, and he’s played the role to a tee. Torturing Scorpius, shooting him to death. Braca’s double-agent status could explain how Scorpius didn’t die on Arnessk – who better to shoot you in a non-vital location than your mole? Grayza is apparently unaware that her pet Captain is still in Scorpy’s employ, though that could just be her exploiting his double-agent status for her own purposes.

Grayza’s purposes, as it happens, aren’t all that bad. A negotiated peace settlement with the Scarrans is only terrible in the sense that they’ll stab the Peacekeepers in the neck with the same pen they just used to sign the treaty. Her motives are worthy, but the end results she chooses to pursue those goals are questionable, and the methods she uses to achieve those results are downright horrific. Case in point, she left a present for Crichton on Moya. A green, acrobatic, toothy present. Which given that Moya dropped down the wormhole to present-day Earth, means there is now a Grayza-methodology mantis-alien over or on Earth.

Crichton’s absolute joy at the little things that he missed on Earth is fantastic. Milk, blue jeans, Cher outfits. The big things are there too, including things that won’t be there in his own time: His girlfriend Kim, who he continues flirting with despite being roughly twice her age. His mother, who died before he left for the Uncharted Territories. The opportunity to see his parents young, healthy, and in a loving relationship – it’s the sort of thing everyone has to reexamine with adult’s eyes when they get the chance. The young John Crichton; hotheaded, impulsive, stubborn. We can see the untempered characteristics that make him the astronaut we know and love almost twenty years later. And Jack Crichton. Balancing career and family, and watching both suffer. His relationship with John is complicated from the very beginning, and we see those roots here.

It’s a pity we don’t see a young DK running around.

Young John mistaking Chiana for Karen Shaw is… oh, man. Finally, Chi gets to do the dirty deed with a John Crichton. Not necessarily the one she was hoping for, but he’s young and distractible. Amusing that he doesn’t make any comment about her coloration. And I suppose that, being his first time, he wouldn’t notice any unusual alien bits and pieces.

Noranti’s method of reviving young John after accidentally killing him. Scene raised, point made, throwing up now, moving on.

That poor Sheriff! One deleted scene shows that he only investigated that house because the nosy neighbor called him in, and what does he get for it? Hallucinogenic dust in the face, dumped on a curb with an empty bottle of whisky, punched in the face, narcotongued, and briefly investigated by Mulder and Scully.

Rygel’s jack’o’lantern is the best such thing I’ve ever seen. Seriously. What’s scarier than Scorpius in pumpkin? Nothing, that’s what.

Then, finally, temporal snarl unsnarled, our heroes fly back to Moya. She’s taken up orbit over Earth, and has visitors aboard. Three suits and Jack Crichton. John immediately pulls his gun, having been fooled no less than three times previously. His first question, the one that has been previously used to verify his identity, naturally makes absolutely no sense without context.

…I do have to ask, how did Moya get down that wormhole? She’s positively phobic about them now.

I love how Crichton lets Aeryn and D’Argo drive on the way back. Sure, he has more experience navigating wormholes, but the odds that he might drive them into another time paradox are a bit too high for his comfort.

Tessa

Okay, so when we last left Crichton, he took a wrong turn out of the wormhole and rather than winding up back at the time and place he left, he found himself instead above Earth, with no way to contact anyone, and no obvious way to go anywhere other than float just out of reach of the place he’s been working so hard to get to all this time. In other words, totally screwed.

Fortunately for him, his com suddenly springs back to life, and he’s able to communicate with D’Argo and the others, who follow his com’s signal through a new wormhole and make it to the same place and time he wound up in order to save him.

Wait, what?

Okay, let’s ignore the fact that he’s not remotely in range where that com should work properly, we find out later that he’s not even in the same place in time as the others at that point. So, uh… what? Even if we were to handwave it and say that somehow the magical properties of the wormhole now also have the ability to fling messages between ridiculous distances and totally different places in the timeline (which, considering we learned last week don’t connect two specific points in time, space, or reality, but can lead to pretty much anywhere, and so this either doesn’t make sense by the rules they only just added, or it’s yet another amazing stroke of luck for our plot-armored heroes), the wormhole isn’t open on either side when communications suddenly work again.

And… after spending three seasons exploring the difficulty of understanding and navigating wormholes, and right after a full episode devoted to telling us exactly why it’s such a dangerous thing to do… now apparently anyone can do it and reach where they’re trying to go by locking onto a voice signal in a communications link that shouldn’t even be working.

So, uh, what?

You know what? Screw it. I don’t even care anymore. Wormholes can do whatever they want, fine, it’s cool.

Because Crichton showed up prior to the point he left the timeline, there are a few tiny differences that, if left unchecked, will ripple out and cause much bigger ones. I’m… still not entirely certain how or why that works, since there’s no logical reason why Crichton and crew showing up in space above Earth and then flying down to the surface while cloaked should have triggered any kind of decision making before they even interact with anybody. I know, I know, Einstein said so, we’ve been told it works that way so just go with it, but it would have been far more satisfying to see an actual contextual reason why Crichton showing up where and when he did caused those changes to start taking place. Here it… just happens, and we just have to go with being told that this is just what you get when you mess with wormholes.

So, in a somewhat Back to the Future style plot, they have to do what they can to set events back on course or risk the future as they know it being totally altered. On a side note, I understand Crichton reaching the conclusion he does with what would happen to the others should events not be fixed, but he’s making a rather large assumption that their situations wouldn’t be altered also. If showing up too early caused his father to make a different decision on a whim, who’s to say that, as things ripple outwards, that the other characters wouldn’t go through similar things? After all, they came through the wormhole the same exact way he did, so why does the time anomaly focus on Crichton alone, and not also have repercussions on them as well?

Okay, so, problems with the setup aside, the episode is incredibly entertaining for exactly the reasons you’d think it is. Crichton has to deal with the awkward situations of interacting with people from his past who feel he looks incredibly familiar but can’t work out why (we get into serious creepy territory when he starts interacting with Kim, since, as Weston mentioned, he’s twice her age at this point and yet still can barely hide his feelings while talking to her). His scene where he attempts to talk to his mother (who died four years before the Farscape project commenced) to warn her about Jack going up in the shuttle is fantastic. You can see in his face, in his body language, hear in the shaky way he talks to her that he desperately wants to tell her who he really is, and to spend time with her. But, out of context to her, it adds to the ethereal nature of the “character” he’s trying to play. He totally comes off as a spaced out spiritualist who has been seeing visions (or alternatively, is on drugs and thinks he is, we are in the 80’s, after all, but its a good thing his mother believes in those sorts of things), and his emotional state only helps to sell it. Both scenes where he’s talking with his mother are just painful to watch. I teared up a little when he tries to warn her about the illness she’ll eventually die to, only to be seconds too late to be within earshot.

On the flip side, of course, there’s… everyone else. For the Moya crew, this is one big fish out of water storyline, as they all struggle to deal with a language they all barely know to speak, bodies that only barely squeak by as not drawing too much attention by the fact that it’s the day before Halloween, and dealing with a nosy neighbor and a cop who won’t leave them alone. There are far too many hilarious moments to name them all without stretching this on for a while, but I loved Aeryn trying get the others to watch and understand Sesame Street (“Q, R, S… S! This girl is slow!”), as well as Nana Peepers using her drugs to get the cop to see D’Argo take off his “mask”.

Rygel on sugar is one of the greatest things to ever grace the screen. Welcome to the cult, my diminutive Hynerian friend. Next, we get you on caffeine! And then both! That’s when things really get fun.

I totally didn’t make the connection between Chiana as Karen Shaw and Maldis’ mention of John losing his virginity to a girl of the same name back in Season One until Weston mentioned it, and… wow. I love it. That’s both brilliant and… confusing, because it seems to run counter to what we’ve otherwise heard about time travel in the Farscape universe. It fits the Douglas Adams time travel theory more than anything (which says that if you go to the past and wind up changing something, it was supposed to happen that way in the first place and therefore you didn’t actually change anything). Of course, there could be an actual Karen Shaw in existence elsewhere that Crichton was supposed to meet up and lose his virginity to in the back of a four-wheel, but… I kind of like the idea that it was Chiana all along, meaning that they were in some form supposed to make that jump backwards in time after all. It muddies things up a bit, but I think it’s fantastic.

Meanwhile, back on Moya… we finally learn who it was that Scorpius had as a spy all this time when Grayza and Braca catch Moya and board her. It turns out that it was Braca all along (who must have some way of at least partially resisting Grayza’s hypno-boob-sweat stuff for that to work), which on the one hand, does make me happy (I love Braca, and his devotion to Scorpius is both adorable and awesome and I can only imagine the fanfics that spawned from their embrace this episode), but at the same time, I was kind of holding out hope we would have seen Strappa showing up again as the spy. Oh well, not a big deal in the long run. Yay, Braca’s still a good gu- er, well, a good bad gu… Okay, um… he’s on Scorpius’ side, and Scorpius, for what it’s worth, is mostly on our protagonist’s side. So he’s, uh, a good-ish bad guy that’s a helpful force to the good-ish bad guy who is currently a helpful force to our protagonists. Who could conceivably be called bad-ish good guys.

Dealing in moral grays gets confuzzling sometimes.

Kevin

There needs to be some sort of special award to give Ben Browder for his acting in this episode. Not only is it heartbreaking to see his face when talking to his mother, his younger self, or his ex-girlfriend, but that final scene when they rejoin Moya over present-day Earth, and the Maintenance Bay Doors open and Jack Crichton and some Secret Service type people are waiting for him? Terror. Uncertainty. Hope. Disbelief. Possibly a little bit of nausea. All of these play over his face in the half second it takes to register, and it’s quite possibly the most emotional scene this season, if not the entire series.

What’s more, we’re reminded yet again how much Crichton is the Audience Proxy. We not only see the story from (mostly) his perspective, but we’re feeling all of those things at the same time. We’ve wanted Crichton to come home for three and a half years now, and now that we’re faced with this possibly very real prospect… we’re terrified. What does this mean? Is this the real life, or is this just fantasy? (We’ve been caught in a landslide and have no esca- ow ow ow Tessa stop) And what’s more – and something we’ll be exploring shortly – now that Crichton knows exactly what is out there in the rest of the galaxy, does he still want to go home? This is a question he’s been struggling with for a while now, and as I mentioned last week, he’s been trying really hard to convince himself that it’s still his goal. He wants to go home. He wants to leave this all behind him.

Now he’s home. And not only is he faced with the one person he’s been thinking about for the past three years, but a whole American delegation is standing in Moya’s Maintenance Bay. Both his homes, his old and his new, have been tangled together, and everything’s starting to get a bit fuzzy.

More than any of this, however, is what Jack must be feeling. Three and a half years ago, he watched his son disappear. Likely everyone thought he was dead, caught up in an explosion. Now, an alien spaceship appears in the skies above Earth, and what goes through his head? Especially when they A: seem to speak – or at least understand – English, B: know who his son is, and C: by the way his son is flying into the hangar now. The son he struggled to connect with all his life. The son who eventually reconciled his feelings and decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. The son who for all intents and purposes was dead because of it.

The son who is wearing alien clothing, leaps backwards upon seeing him, draws an alien weapon and points it directly at his face. The son whose face is wild, afraid, and now babbling nigh-incoherently. The son he lost who might not be exactly his son anymore.

We know Crichton’s gone slightly native, but we’ve only seen it from the perspective of him trying to fit in with these strange people and their strange worlds, while still identifying very strongly with his humanity. Everything he’s said and done up until now has been very human in comparison to everything else. But now, we see it from the other side. We see how much he’s changed, how – for lack of a better term – alien he has become.

It’s a powerful scene, and I love these people for being able to portray it on the strength of their acting alone, their body language and facial expressions and precious little dialogue.

Special Wormhole Section:
I have a feeling that Tessa and I are going to be debating the wormhole thing for the rest of the season. Or at least until it… devolves into this. Perhaps I’ve been watching too much Deep Space Nine or Voyager lately, because the concept of being able to communicate through the wormholes doesn’t seem that strange or inaccurate. Especially since there’s the throwaway line from D’Argo about how the wormhole’s been opening and closing rapidly since Crichton went through it.

Consider everything we’ve learned about wormholes so far, mechanically. Crichton himself postulated that the wormholes are always there, they just phase out of sight by rotating 90 degrees from our plane of reality. Which means that they’re, in effect, always open, and a comm signal might still be able to get through when physical matter cannot.

We also know that broadcasts have been going through wormholes practically forever – remember the episode of The Three Stooges that Crichton pulled off the Pathfinder crystal – so it’s not even a last-minute asspull, it’s something they’ve layered into the wormhole mythology. We also know that Moya’s comms are not radio-based, because Crichton asks D’Argo to switch to radio to see what’s going on groundside. If they use some sort of unspecified subspace hetch drive frellnik thing, it could possibly be transmitted through wormholes even better, who knows? But it’s not out of nowhere.

Additionally, it’s not that great of a leap from “Wormholes are all connected, you must navigate carefully” to “Lock onto my signal and use it as a beacon to get through to where I am now”. It’s also something that’s been layered into the mythology for a while; though Moya’s random jumps in Starburst tend to be erratic at best, she can also home onto another Leviathan and travel through the dimensions much more accurately. After all, what is Starburst if not a personal pseudo-wormhole?

In any case, rebuttal, and why I think that the wormhole mythology has actually been relatively consistent with itself and not a series of Eleventh Hour Upgrades.

Noel

No, Kevin, wormhole mythology has not been consistent with itself.

I’ll grant you the com signal thing, though. A wormhole is a tunnel between locations, so light years can suddenly be as close as a mile when going through wormholes, so it makes complete sense that radio communications are still accessible.

However…

Initially, wormholes were like the internet in that they were a series of tubes, all interlinked, all constant, and all you had to do was map out the routes and find the exit you wanted to take. This changed in the last episode where they suddenly became wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey things that one could manipulate with will alone. Instead of having to find the path to the exit point you wanted, somehow the grey matter of a lone human brain is able to manipulate the fabric of this complex transdimensional interstate so all you really have to do to get where you’re going is to think about it really really hard. This is not consistent. And what happens if multiple people are travelling together? We see it happen here where everybody aboard Lo’La enters the wormhole, and instead of following their subconscious wills to some random location, they just casually follow a signal and come up alongside John. Were they all thinking of the same place? Even though they’d never seen that specific place so as to think about it? Were they all just thinking of John on the way there and Moya on the way back? How come nobody accidentally screwed the pooch by conjuring up a reminiscence of the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man?

This is not consistent, Kevin. If you have a set fixture of entry and exit points, thinking about things shouldn’t change them, let alone suddenly throw a kink into the timestream that leaves John in the shoes of Marty McFly. Remember the plot thread about people liquefying? Don’t bring up the cheat of calling them “unstable wormholes”, because it’s a fixed network, right? A fixed network where everything is interlinked can’t be both unstable and stable. Maybe the entry points can be, but how does that liquefy people. My point is, that was a cheap plot conceit concocted for no reason than slowing down Scorpius’ research. This entire time travel scenario is another, where the uneven previous episode set up brand new rules just so this episode could happen. There’s no other reason for any of it. Those rules are unnecessary. That episode was unnecessary. This episode is unnecessary. The show is starting to feed in on itself in one big stream of “let’s just do stuff for the hell of it”.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a blast of an episode. There’s parts that don’t make a lick of sense (How exactly did John change things in the first place? Are you kidding me with the non-corporeal state bit?) but it gets by with the thrill of John being back home, just not quite in the way he imagined, and the others doing exactly what you’d expect them to when you tell them to lie low. I love Aeryn “going native” in the most adorably awkward ways possible. I love the clever way they threw a bone to John/Chiana shippers. I love Noranti instantly making her crazy antics at home. I love D’Argo so constantly flustered that he just stops trying after a while. I love Rygel with the Tessa jitters. I love the many birds that are flipped. I love the nosy neighbor. I love the cop who’s so crazed by the end that not even Mulder and Scully will give him the time of day.

There’s so much great stuff in there and you can tell everyone is having a blast yet again, but was this the best way to get there? Though it’s not a necessary story before bringing John to Earth, I’ll concede and allow it out of pure fun, but did the means through which we got him into his planet’s past really need to be so heavily convoluted that the entire episode prior had to be concocted just to lay the tracks that carry him there? No. Not at all. John figures out the way home, something happens in the wormhole en route, he gets there but at the wrong time. Boom. A simple cold opening. Doesn’t need Einstein. Doesn’t need the iceberg. Doesn’t need the confessionals by people from his life. Doesn’t need the fun but brain hurting scene of swapped roles on Moya. Doesn’t need an entire 45 minutes of screen time to set the idea up. Get him there, have your Back to the Future shenanigans, then get him to the present. As it is, I’m agitated because we have one unnecessary episode piled on top of another unnecessary episode, and I would be so much more forgiving had they just picked one instead of stringing them back to back like this.

Gah, and other blurts of frustration.

If we really needed to pad out the season block by an episode, why not take the Grayza subplot and make that an entire story? Seriously, it’s perfect. Grayza catches up with the ship (Tormented Space, feh), invades, finds it seemingly empty, Scorpius and Braca cross paths and reveal they’re still an item, Grayza leaves, but not before leaving a little present behind in the form of a “What’s wrong with your faaaaaace!” monstrosity. I’m not sure how you could pad it out, but I have far more interest in seeing more of this angle than I did a lecture on mechanics that were being shoe-horned into the franchise at the last minute.

But then we get to the ending, the oh so magnificent ending that spins the expected on its head in classic Farscape style. Where John finally comes face to face with his smiling father, only to remember all the times this has happened in the past. It’s been a simulation. It’s been a dream. It’s been an alien in disguise. The real Jack is finally standing up, but Crichton’s been burned so many times that he can’t accept it on hope alone.

I can’t wait for next week’s episode. Until then, goodbye, Cookie Monster.

While on a spacewalk to experience the opening of a wormhole up close, John is sucked into the vortex where he’s confronted by an interdimensional being who wants to kill him to prevent wormhole knowledge from being misused.

Noel

Have you heard of my new band, Permanent Unrealized Reality?

This is another one of those episodes that’s largely remembered because it let the cast and crew cut a little loose and come up with some wild gags and imagery; in this case, everyone getting to step into each other’s roles. It starts with Claudia Black doing such a freakishly dead-on Chiana that, had John not called it out right up front that, I wonder how long it would have taken people to catch on to the fact that something is different. Not only is the squeaky mewl of the voice identical, but Black absolutely nails the physicality, with the constantly taut stance and random flares of movement and head motions. Not to knock Black, who’s certainly fit, but it can’t be easy stepping into a role so physically defined by an actress who’s a top class acrobat and martial artist. Then we get into the later scene where the whole crew is all over the place. The Rygel puppet has been decked out with the beard and and tentacles of D’Argo, with Jonathan Hardy building up a warrior’s rumble in the voice. Anthony Simcoe knocks it out of the park as Jool, prancing about, being a diva, and doing the scream. Raelee Hill plays up the crazy and rants left and right as Stark, though I’m a bit disappointed they kept her skin makeup as if to suggest Sikozu herself had become Stark, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Gigi Edgley perfectly captures the deep gaze, elvish smile, and gentle motion of Noranti, and the prosthetic cheeks they added make her visually almost indistinguishable from the real thing, but her voice is the same as always, which is a little jarring when she shares the scene with Claudia Black, who’s still mimicking that voice perfectly. The only one I don’t care for is Melissa Jaffer as Rygel. Not only is the makeup bad, but neither the actress nor the crew really know what to do with the character, so she just kinda wanders around in an odd, forced pose, burping out a line or two.

I like how the plot finally provides an origin for the Ancients, that they’re offshoots of creatures from another dimension specifically engineered to operate in our space, which intersects with theirs through the wormholes. John’s meeting with the being he calls Einstein quite resembles Captain Sisko’s introduction to the Prophets in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, especially the constant flashes of people from John’s memories, but while the Prophets didn’t understand linear time, the Ancient Ancestors know it all too well and Einstein starts to fill John in on the implications of what it means to cross the streams. None of this works for me. The series seems to be having its cake and eating it too by saying there’s an infinite amount of branching possibilities out there, but treating it as though it’s still a singular timeline that can be severely repurcussed by John returning to a space before he left it. If there’s branching possibilities, that suggests multiple time streams and alternate universe, which means he wouldn’t be be altering the time stream at all, merely leaving one and entering another. If he returned to a spot before he left, he wouldn’t really be in the same spot, he’d be creating an alternate spot to exist in where that plays out as it would while the spot he left continues on in its own way. And it wouldn’t be some crazy alternate dimension, it would be the same as the one he left, but with the one little difference of his arrival at the point he showed up. The episode also suggests that the wormholes, instead of merely being vortexes in the rips between space and time, can actually be affected by will alone, and that all John has to do to reach a desired location is to click his heals together three times and think about it really really hard. In what way does this line up with our prior experience with wormholes? Sure, adding the time element increases the already near impossibility of mapping the wormhole network, but never before has anyone who entered a wormhole been shown to appear somewhere simply because they pictured it in their head. It’s trying to be all metaphysical and shit, but it comes off childish and lazy and doesn’t sell to me at all. And, dammit, how can an Unrealized Reality be Permanent? Wouldn’t that just make it a Realized Reality? Is Permanent truly a necessary addition?

And then we return to the sequences of Moya’s cast switching their parts. It’s fun, yes, but I don’t get it. How would John returning to a time shortly before he entered it cause all of his fellow shipmates to psychically exchange their identities? How would it make him a Peacekeeper interrogating a lethal Sikozu? I don’t frelling understand! I love him arriving at his first introduction to the crew, I love the alterations of his first meeting with Aeryn, I love the idea of an alternate world where one single choice resulted in him being an inside man that Crais uses to take down the ship full of escapees, so why couldn’t we play this angle up? Why couldn’t we instead see these alternate versions of familiar events where a single choice leads to a completely different outcome? Wouldn’t that better nail home the message to John about consequences and decisions and being careful what you step in because you never know what stain you’ll leave as you track it onto a carpet? Instead, we just hit him with random nonsense. It’s fun nonsense, it’s very Farscape nonsense, but it’s having so much fun being nonsense that it’s not serving the story or the message this particular episode is trying to tell. Instead of elevating the material or coming out of it naturally, it’s jarring and ultimately weakens the story.

So, no, I can’t say as I like this episode. It’s beautifully directed, the cast is great, I love seeing the cast in everyone else’s parts and the sit-down interviews with people, both new and previously introduced, from John’s life, the opening is great, Einstein is wonderful, and the tiny iceberg setting is simple, but stark and memorable, but I don’t get the other stuff. I don’t get what they’re trying to do with wormholes. I don’t get their vision of alternate possibilities. I don’t get the way they hammer these consequences home to John. It just plain doesn’t work for me.

Maybe there’s an unrealized reality out there where I do get it. Some branching, parallel dimension where I’m suddenly played by Tessa.

Weston

There’s a lot going on in this episode. Let me see if I can break it down.

Once upon a time, there was a boy named John. John went into the space program, became an astronaut, and got shot through a wormhole. Hijinks ensued, and then someone messed around with time travel resulting in…

Once upon a time, there was a boy named John. He was a jerk. Nobody liked him, and Caroline says he was terrible in bed. Through sheer talent, and having nothing to do with effort, he became an astronaut. He got shot through a wormhole and messed around with time travel, resulting in…

Once upon a time, there was a boy named John. He was completely unmemorable, nothing interesting happened around him. But someone messed around with time travel, resulting in…

Once upon a time, there was a boy named John. He died very young, well before his mother passed from cancer. Then someone messed around with time travel, resulting in…

Once upon a time, there was a boy named John. He got shot through a wormhole, joined the Peacekeepers, was promoted to Captain over Braca, and shot a Scarran spy named Sikozu. Then someone messed around with time travel, resulting in…

Once upon a time, there was a boy named John. He was born several centuries after Earth was subjugated by the Scarran Empire, and an unsuited Scorpius was his father. A father… who burned hot dogs.

Okay, that last one is terrifying. What is demonstrated here is the true power of a wormhole weapon: Not the ability to destroy planets or star systems, but the capacity to rewrite your own history. Or someone else’s history. To eliminate your enemies before they even know they’re your enemy. If two opposing forces develop these devices simultaneously, you could wind up with a full fledged Time War.

Unrealized realities are could-have-beens, potential results from alternative choices. They don’t exist until someone takes a right turn at Albuquerque and winds up in Mexico with Wayne Pygram playing Jack. It’s the Back To The Future model. The person with the time machine controls the single timeline that’s “on”, but there are thousands or millions of alternate universes where everyone has goatees. Possible, but non-existent. All it takes to trigger a shift onto one of those parallel lines is one time traveler arriving at a previous point within their own lifetime.

But. Should events be matched closely enough to course, time has a way of preserving major outcomes. Time is resilient, permitting minor alterations while remaining largely intact. Harvey knew this. He’d cracked the Ancients’ code, but didn’t tell Crichton, and was unable to transfer the cracked data to Scorpius’ neural chip. Unfortunate that he isn’t around to soak Crichton’s wrath.

Einstein takes a different tack to unlock Crichton’s wormhole knowledge than Jack. Where Jack killed Harvey and releases the memories manually, Einstein forces Crichton to open them up himself. It manifests as the voices of people Crichton’s known, people who know him, voices that advise him on how wormhole navigation works. The key moment comes when he realizes that he can interact with them, ask them questions, and get real answers. With what he learns on the iceberg, Crichton gains the ability to not only properly surf wormholes, but bodysurf them.

Noel’s right about the mix-and-match crew – it’s bonkers and amazing. I’ve always pictured it as a worse form of the body-switcheroo, or maybe they let NamTar play Lego genetics. Either way, everyone but Crichton got tossed in a blender. We never see what Zhaan and Aeryn wound up looking like, though given the options remaining I suspect that Stark wound up in Zhaan’s blue makeup and Aeryn got Sikozu’s red hair and makeup.

One moment, I need to imagine Aeryn with wavy red hair.

Meanwhile, back on the ship: Aeryn (with regular straight black hair) is reading T’John’s starchart and practicing her English with the word “existence”. D’Argo found Crichton’s drug stash and calls him out on taking anything Noranti Nana Peepers creates. Sikozu and Scorpius formalize their relationship with an alliance, and she tweaks his new coolant rods. Rygel regrows his mustache and eyebrows and chats with Pilot about taking Moya down a wormhole.

This is the episode that convinced me that Crichton’s first trip through a wormhole hadn’t just propelled him through space, but it also dropped him in the distant future. A point long after humanity had expanded into the galaxy and become Peacekeepers.

In conclusion: “Time.”

Tessa

This is a really interesting example of an episode where almost everything is great, and yet the overall package is a little off. The acting is phenomenal, the dialogue is great, the scenery is great, the visuals are fantastic, the humor is Farscape’s usual wackiness… so what exactly goes wrong? I have to agree with Noel that the problem lies in the basis of the entire episode being on a flawed concept, which drags what should be a spectacular episode down to just okay.

Before I get into all that, though, I want to touch on the good parts of this episode, because there were an awful lot. We’ve talked about the actors on Farscape being incredibly adept at not only their own roles, but being able to slip into each other’s characters as well. Claudia Black plays Chiana so well that it didn’t even dawn on me at first that it wasn’t Gigi Edgely in the first alternate-universe hop. The other character-swaps almost play out more as parodies of the characters, but they’re still incredibly fun to watch and well-acted. Anthony Simcoe in particular is incredibly fun to watch go totally nuts as Jool, and he plays the hell out of the part.

I love the “Einstein” character, this ethereal old-ish man in a suit who is making an attempt to look human and familiar, and yet he’s instantly recognizable as being something other than human. I like the explanation that the Ancients are an offshoot of his species that adapted to live in our dimension, specifically so they could keep an eye on what people were learning about wormholes… and yet, this doesn’t exactly match up with what the Ancients actually did earlier in the series, as they seemed far more concerned with their own survival, and other than John, they didn’t really check up on anyone else that was looking into wormhole tech (Furlow is sort of incidentally stumbled upon while fake-Jack is looking for John, and there’s no evidence that the Ancients even glanced in Scorpius’ direction despite all of his work on wormhole technology). I kind of wonder if maybe the Ancients lost track of their original purpose at some point, possibly even forgetting where they originally came from, or simply abandoned their mission once their lives were put in danger.

For all of the wackiness and humor involved, there’s also some seriously creepy moments going on in some of the alternate realities. Sikozu is genuinely terrifying as an enemy, and things about her that we didn’t necessarily see as threatening in the past (such as her ability to simply walk up walls) suddenly becomes extremely scary when she’s the monster killing a room full of people. Her hissing delivery of the line “Weak species” sent chills down my spine. With the scene on Moya at the beginning of the episode where she seems to enter into a closer alliance with Scorpius, I almost have to wonder if we maybe aren’t getting a little peek at what could potentially come out of her character down the road if things stack up to put her in opposition with the rest of the crew.

That, however, doesn’t even hold a candle to the extremely unsettling and almost nightmarish scenario where the Earth has been conquered by the Scarrans for some time, and humans don’t quite look human anymore as a result. It’s not a post-apocalyptic setting, or even a particularly oppressive looking one, it’s a very simple sunny day on a dock with John’s now very Scorpius-like father (Wayne Pygram is fantastic in the role, incidentally) is having a barbecue. It’s a perfectly normal scene, that plays out as if nothing is wrong… except for little things just feeling very wrong. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought the most unsettling part of the whole thing was “Jack” holding up a charred hot dog that has caught on fire and offering it to John, with no acknowledgement from either one of them that something was wrong with the situation. It was flashed to multiple times, and I can’t really tell if it was intended to be funny or disturbing (possibly both), but it was by far the scariest scene for me in the episode.

So, where does this episode fall short? It’s almost entirely in the basic concepts. For one, I love the idea of alternate universes, and I really like the premise of this episode, but we don’t get enough time in any one of the alternate realities to really explore the concept. I’m with Noel in being fascinated with the version of events that puts him in cahoots with Crais to bring down Moya and crew from the inside, but we barely get to see any of that angle, because the wacky character swapping takes front and center and distracts from what’s actually going on. Which, I guess, was partially the point, but I would actually have liked to see that version of events in a lot more depth. I almost wish that rather than plopping John in and out of multiple universes and times, that they had just picked one and let us see things fleshed out more and taken seriously.

That’s not to say that I don’t like the character swapping, because that has some of the more funny bits of the episode and features some really great performances, but I kind of wish they had separated it into its own thing as opposed to tying it to one of the more interesting potential realities. It’s almost a throw away joke to start with, why not just go all the way and do a quick “and in this universe everyone is a different person” thing? Part of the problem with it, I think, is that we do start out so subtle with the change, with Claudia Black’s Chiana being nearly indistinguishable from Gigi Edgely’s, only to dive headfirst into the other characters, who are anything but subtle about their differences. It’s a concept that starts out as something that can be taken seriously, but takes a sudden turn towards the nonsensical. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on its own, but once we start getting invested in the idea, effectively pulling the rug out from under us at the halfway point (and then attempting to slide it back under our feet at the end with what’s otherwise a very interesting twist) is more than a little jarring.

And then we have the wormholes. The effective dues ex machina of the series. It’s a little frustrating that the rules by which the wormholes work by keep changing to fit the narrative. I don’t mind the addition of new complexities to the wormholes themselves as much (after all, part of the whole point is that they aren’t understood), but the continuity throughout the show in regards to wormhole travel is terrible.

For one, the physical dangers involved in wormhole travel (which themselves seemed to come out of nowhere in Season 3 seeing as prior to that they had never been mentioned) appears to have gone out the window. The original explanation was both that there was something special about Crichton’s module, as well as “added finesse” involved in flying through a wormhole that made it safe from being liquefied while traveling in one. Neither of those concepts apply when John gets sucked in on his own, with only a space suit protecting him. By the previous set wormhole rules, he shouldn’t have survived the trip. Not to mention that the added complexities of wormholes traveling space, time, and (apparently) alternate universes mean that every prior trip through a wormhole has been paired with astronomical strokes of good luck, since probability-wise the number of trips taken through wormholes (most of them blind trips) and winding up back in the place, time, and universe intended every time is phenomenally low.

That said, I don’t have as much of an issue with the idea of John being able to navigate his way through in the way presented to him at the end. I took it as less of a willpower thing and more that John’s been subconsciously “cataloging” coordinates in his head while traveling in wormholes (which I suppose post-Ancients encounter could be the hand-wave for making it out of other wormholes, although that still leaves the Pathfinder incident unexplained). It’s a little overly convenient, but not any less believable than most of the plot device that the Ancient’s information stuck in his head has been.

On a final, nitpicky note, they seem to have totally given up on even bothering to justify Tormented Space. The actual issues with flying in it only took a quick upgrade to Moya’s filter to resolve, and nothing remotely out of the norm for the series has happened while there. And now that John has accidentally flung himself back to Earth, I’m having doubts that we’ll even see much more of Tormented Space or that anything there is going to be particularly torment-y. Disappointing.

So, in the end, there was more about this episode that I liked than there was that I had problems with. The problems, while few, are admittedly pretty big, but in the end I still enjoyed the episode on the whole. Not my favorite, but far from the worst of this season.

John Crichton. Astronaut. Thrown half a galaxy away from home, given knowledge and tools that make him the most dangerous person in the universe, and he still considers himself a regular guy. His greatest claim is that he’s not a hero. He will go out of his way to say that he still doesn’t belong here in Tormented Space some indistinguishable segment of the Uncharted Regions, because he’s not the hero. Stop calling him that. Seriously, please, stop bringing up all the amazingly wonderful things he’s done against the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans, and very much please never mention all the times he caused innocent people to die simply because he was there. He’s very much a non-entity, regardless of what keeps happening to and because of him.

No, he’s not protesting too much. No, he’s not trying to convince himself because he’s starting to doubt his place in the universe. He has no intention of staying with his new friends who would die for him (and some who already have), his favorite new technology and the names he has given them, or the woman he has loved for three and a half seasons and is possibly carrying his child. He’s certainly not fascinated by the cultures, varied life-forms, or new concepts and sciences he’s discovered in his travels. He wants nothing to do with any of them.

Each man gets a chance to be his own kind of hero, but that’s not him. He’s not a nomad. He’s not a converted citizen of the cosmos. He’s just trying to get home.

We’ve begun the final storyarc of the series. Strap yourselves in and check your preconceptions at the door.

Crichton has returned home. Now we’ll see if he was telling the truth. Now we’ll see if he honestly believes himself.

Notes!

I don’t think the rules for wormholes have changed drastically over the series. Specifically, only unstable wormholes liquify people, though whether a wormhole is stable or not depends on plot purposes, I’ll grant you. But if you go back one by one, it all fits.

Crichton accidentally [stumbles upon/creates] a fully-stable wormhole over Earth. Ancients note this but do nothing, as it is a fluke.

Crichton intentionally re-creates another wormhole over TattooineDelvian Pleasure-Dome Furlow’s planet. Ancients take notice, though Crichton does not travel through it.

Moya is caught in a stable, looping wormhole, encounters Pathfinder vessel. Note that A: the Ancients are aware of the Pathfinders and B: this is where we first learn of inter-connected wormholes. A wormhole nexus, if you will. One point of entry gives multiple points of exit, it’s a matter of choosing the right one.

Scorpius sets up shop outside an instable wormhole. Liquifies every single pilot. Initial work is made on a device that makes travel through instable wormholes possible.

Furlow and Predaclones make successive trips through wormholes in a replica of Crichton’s ship. Ancients frelling take notice.

Remaining Crichton starts working out wormhole physics, unconsciously learns how to map entrances and exits by experiencing them.

This week’s episode.

The only new thing we learned was that wormholes bridge not just spatial coordinates, but temporal ones as well, the subsequent paradoxes splitting off into alternate dimensions where they can be catalogued and dealt with accordingly.

Ancients know how to dress. Check out that GQ motherfrellnik, goddamn.

In an alternate reality where the only (visible) change is that Crichton joins the Peacekeepers, Sikozu is arrested as a Scarran spy. We encountered “our” Sikozu in Scarran space. Sikozu is getting closer and closer to Scorpius.

That said, I kind of like the Sikozu/Scorpius pairing. They’re both methodical, intelligent, and it’s kind of cute in a mutual leather kind of way.

It’s very much apparent that Virginia Hey is now wearing a bald cap over hair, though the makeup is so good that I don’t really care. Sure, there’s a bit of forehead bulging, but it’s Zhaan. The most beautiful and glamorous woman on the entire show.

I love love love that Rygel climbs up on Pilot’s “lap” to talk to him. Little things like that just make me so happy.

“Excuse me, ladies, can I have your attention? Does any of you have one of THESE under your skirt?”
*rapid gunfire*
“Yeah! Girl Power!”

When a mechanic is found that can upgrade Moya to survive in Tormented Space, things are looking up – until an opportunistic doctor infects everyone with a fatal disease. He’s willing to trade the antidote for large bags of money, but Crichton and Company must move quickly, because anyone caught with similar symptoms will be shot on sight…

Kevin

Given the travesty of last episode, I was much happier to be watching this week, which could very well have served as a decent introduction to Tormented Space. Moya is being constantly bombarded with Plot Device Radiation, which prevents proper rest and will eventually drive her mad. The only mechanics in the area that are familiar with Leviathan biology are on a nearby planet, and will only work on Moya once everyone’s been cleared of SPAAAAAAAAAACE MAAAADNEEEEESSSSSSS.

The plot is silly, singular, simplistic, and I loved every bit of it. Sure, it doesn’t advance the season’s story arc in any noticeable fashion, but it dialed back the oppressive sense of doom that our crew has been under – without removing it completely, mind you – and brought us back to the quirky, gross, and undeniably fun show that we’ve been missing this season. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been loving Season Four unreservedly (last week notwithstanding), but it’s good to get back to the roots.

And what roots they are! We have Sikozu, an even more incomprehensible lifeform in an already incomprehensible universe, adding snake-like metabolism to her already impressively inscrutable biology. D’Argo, our King of Physical Comedy, who completely steals the show without having a majority of screen-time. Rygel using his guile and poise to out-ruthless the crooked doctor. Nana Peepers, who is… unquantifiably glorious (I love Melissa Jaffer’s completely shameless and yet somehow graceful portrayal of Noranti).

Hell, even Scorpius is getting in on the Classic Farscape Action, being suave, controlling, coldly and efficiently homicidal, and ultimately one-upping everyone with his personal efforts to save the crew. He’s keeping in complete character as someone that the crew still doesn’t trust but has earned a bit of free rein on the ship, and is staying true to his word about keeping Crichton alive for whatever reason may be dominant.

There’s no epic saving of the day, aside from a scene that my fiancée will kill me once she realizes she missed Ben Browder in somewhat convincing drag. There’s no overarching moral dilemma, since the Women’s Suffrage Movement are just as nasty as the men they’re trying to overthrow (and in the end everyone acknowledges that it’s Not Our Business). There’s simply a quality episode that’s filled with equal amounts fun and nausea.

“Hello, boys.”

Which is really what Farscape has always been about, and I’m glad to see it return.

Noel

As with the last episode, this story takes us into a strongly divided culture barely maintaining order as dissent and mutiny boil beneath the surface. Last week failed because it put this struggle front and center, expecting us to care about dry people we’d never heard of in a cliched pissing contest over clan leadership. This week succeeds because it holds that in the background. Seriously, this story is about our crew getting screwed by a doctor who poisons them and promises a cure in return for every cent they have, and all of the stuff about women’s suffrage and corrupt politicians is merely background flavoring to heighten the stakes and give it an extra bit of zing. And instead of infodumping all the exposition on us in a non-linear opening act that keeps looping us back and back and back again to make sure we know all the parts that will be played before we see them play, this one does things smart and fast, only revealing info to us as it becomes relevant to our hero’s main struggle. The Moya crew couldn’t give two frells about the current political climate of this world. They want their filter, they want their antidote, and they want to take off, and they only pay attention to the complexities of their surroundings when they have no choice but to dive into those waters. This is how you build a culture over the course of a single episode. Sure, it’s a little thin, but we have the pecking order of the males over the females and the slimy doctor playing both sides, until the ladies decide to silence the middle man in preparation for a huge coup d’état that’s on the verge of launching, the execution and effects of which we never see because our heroes are out by that point and have no interest in looking back.

As Kevin pointed out, there’s very little in the way of ties to the broader season arc this week – unless you count bonding time between D’Argo and Noranti, or Scorpius winning a little more respect as he steps up to the plate for the team – but it more than makes up for it with yet more of the classic Farscape fun and games. Noranti pissing in a pot. D’Argo drinking said piss while Noranti drinks his, then the two cuddling for hours until a layer of slime forms between them. Rygel bloodying himself up and pretending to be a doctor. Aeryn farting. Sikozu parting with a finger. And John. Oh, John. Always having to steal the show whenever the crazy must be brought. John dressed as a woman is really quite fetching, thanks to Ben Browder’s prettied face and good taste in dress and wig, but I love that John barely does anything to sell this disguise as a character. There’s a few sways and “delicate” hand work, about on the level of Captain Jack Sparrow, but he otherwise looks like the proverbial man who lost the bet as he doesn’t even really change his voice at all beyond laying on a bit of his formal Peacekeeper accent. Again, it’s not that Browder isn’t selling it, it’s that he’s nailing Crichton’s absolute disinterest in wanting to sell it. And I love the twist of the military leader, initially played as the buffoon that doesn’t see through the costume, who takes on a much more interesting air as it’s revealed he’s completely aware of who and what he has his hands on, and he’s all the happier for it.

It’s a great episode. Not as wild and zany as some of their other caper one-offs, but rich, clever, and full of the attitude that makes this show a classic.

A few thoughts:

Still not sold on Tormented Space. The “Moya maddening radiation” is yet another plot device we hear about but never experience and, really, any other random situation on the craft could have easily routed our heroes where they ended up. If I don’t see some genuine tormenting soon, I’m going to be mightily disappointed.

Aeryn farts when Rygel farts, okay. But why do her farts sound like his fart, instead of the cheek ripper one would especially get in leather pants like hers?

If they need the same type of mollusks they ate from for the cure, why don’t they just use the actual mollusks they ate from? Y’know, the ones that are still revealed to have active bacteria in them when Scorpius scarfs down a bit. And don’t say that they were back on Moya because there is some ferrying of the crew back and forth over the course of things, and they easily could have grabbed the leftovers on their way.

I find myself strangely smitten with Noranti’s pissing stance.

Please tell me I’m not the only one wondering if Dr. Tumii and Grunchlk are from the same species.

Weston

This is the episode where Scorpius fully integrates as a member of the crew. He’s not trusted by any measure, no more than anyone was back in season one. Or two. Or… y’know, there hasn’t been a whole lot of trust in this group. In that respect, yes, he’s fitting right in. He’s no longer confined to a cell, has free roam of the ship, gives the official escorting the mechanic a tour, visits Pilot to chat about the complications encountered on the settlement. He adapts quickly to the official’s prejudice, telling him what he wants to hear, then kills him when he interferes with the installation of Moya’s new radiation filter. And then, in a moment of awesome, saves everyone by introducing himself into the mollusk neural network. He soaks the effects long enough for everyone downstairs to get started on the cure, then manually eliminates it from his system. They could have done it the regular way, but I’m not sure Scorpy has enough exposed skin to make it work.

Two notes on the Scorpius clam scene: I love the music while he’s setting up the clams, and I love the immediate segue to D’Argo and Noranti. Big dramatic scene with major chord chorus and the major antagonist solidifying his heel-face turn leading straight into D’Argo stuck with an old woman sleeping on him.

Related note, Wayne Pygram has a nice set of molars and one obvious cap. And it looks like he still has his wisdom teeth.

Sikozu’s unusual biology comes up again. Only eating once every five weeks or so must have significant advantages for things like spaceflight. Reduces the amount of mass you need to set aside for things like dehydrated ice cream. She still thinks she can operate Moya better than Pilot, but that isn’t so much a biology thing as it is psychology.

I completely agree with Noel, this doctor Tumii could definitely be a Grunchlik cousin. I wonder how well they would get along as business partners.

Tumii asks for one-point-five million in currency pledgers to cure our heroes. They pay immediately, in a subversion of the usual blackmail trope, but he can’t actually follow through on his end of the bargain. The lesson, of course, is that if you’re going to poison someone for money, have the antidote immediately available. The following question is how much money Moya’s flying around with if they can part with it that easily. Quite a bit, apparently, even after splitting the loot from the Shadow Depository four ways.

Noranti and D’Argo. Already said it, need to say it again. The paint-shaker, the three arn handshake, the “one little pop”. All hilarious.

Chiana takes lead with the guests while everyone else is either incapacitated or Scorpius. She hasn’t been exactly stable since returning to the ship after the events between seasons, and it’s still showing, but she’s pulling back together.

I want to work in a “Women Who Hate Men” crack, but I didn’t see a single dragon tattoo in the entire episode. Sad face.

Rygel shaved his mustache and eyebrows to get into the club! It’s a little thing, but wow. Also, Crichton hates his fashion choices.

Okay, totally with Noel here, they cannot keep on dodging the issue of Tormented Space having almost no functional difference from the Uncharted Territories. Same as last episode, we get told that there are problems and that things are harder, but there’s nothing of substance to convince us of that. Even worse, the “Moya can’t cope” problem would appear to be mitigated by the repairs that have been made, meaning the problem we just got told was a problem isn’t a problem long enough to actually be a problem that has any real impact. That’s a problem.

We need to be shown, not told. So far there’s been a lot of telling, but we have yet to be shown anything that wouldn’t have been right at home in the Uncharted Territories. That really needs to change if they want to sell us on this concept.

There’s not a whole lot I can say about this one that the others didn’t already cover. As usual we have some great acting on the part of just about everyone who has to deal with the mollusk disease. I really like the character design of the doctor, and I could easily see him being the same race as Grunchlik. Both his design and the slimy opportunistic nature of his character really reminded me of Thénardier from Les Miserables.

I am glad that they didn’t overplay the suffrage angle. It could have turned into “let’s fix this planet’s problems” by making the crew the weight that tips the scales in the battle for gender equality (other shows have done exactly that), but instead the conflict is just an obstacle in their way to getting what they need. With the exception of Chiana, who can relate with the revolutionaries due to her own experiences, none of the crew seem to even particularly care much about the situation beyond the fact that they’re pretty much forced to deal with these people. In the end, it isn’t their fight, and they’re out of there as soon as they’re able to leave.

“I’m not sure I have the strength to miss next time.”
“I think… I’m just a bad shot.”

After Moya stops to rest over a feudalistic society, everyone gets caught up in clan warfare. But when a recent murder is linked to Our Heroes, things start taking a nasty turn…

Tessa

This is our first episode that takes place in Tormented Space, and… we don’t see Tormented Space. We hear about it, sure, Moya is apparently out cold due to traveling in it, but this is all second hand knowledge. This was what I was worried about going into this. We get mentions that things are more difficult for them now, but it certainly doesn’t feel that different. This episode could easily have been just as at home in any other part of the series before the Tormented Space idea. All we’ve done is swap out “commerce planet” for “drinking water” as the thing that dictates where the crew needs to stop. Sure, I guess it sounds more dire, but only in the same way that “Tormented Space” sounds slightly more dangerous than “Uncharted Territories”. Functionally, nothing seems to have changed. It’s not enough to just get told in offhand comments that things are harder now. We need to actually see it. Now, granted, this is only the first episode taking place in this area, and we haven’t actually seen Tormented Space from… space yet. So maybe when we do, that’ll make a difference.

All of that said, it doesn’t mean the episode itself is bad. I really enjoy plot lines that involve political intrigue, and this one certainly has that, even if it’s a little simplistic and predictable. I like the setup of the government on the planet, and that it does have problems, and isn’t entirely stable. It’s very believable that the plotting that happens in the episode can take place, because the system as shown does seem very vulnerable to it. Once everything’s resolved, the new leader that steps up takes steps to change the way things are run in the hopes of preventing something like it from happening again. It’s maybe a little too cleanly wrapped up, but then we don’t actually see how things play out after our heroes leave, we just get the implication that things will probably be fine. It’s a story I’d actually be interested in following up on, to see what the consequences of Zerbat’s choices will be and how his attempts at leading will fare, given that it’s established that he’s practically seen as an outsider. Given his relationship with Sikozu throughout the episode, maybe it’s something that will pop up again later, but it’s probably more likely that this is a one-off thing.

The fractured way of telling the story does draw out the suspense a bit, although I almost think it’s a little too confusing. By the end of it we’ve seen the same scenes three different times, each time giving us a slightly different perspective and a little more information than we got last time. It’s not the first time we’ve seen a story unfold like this, and I really like the idea, but for some reason I wasn’t thrilled with it on a first watch through. Combined with Aeryn’s hallucinatory urges, the beginning especially is maybe a little too jumbled, and it pulled me out of my enjoyment a bit. Interestingly, on a second watch through, I enjoyed the style far more, but then, I also already knew what was going on from the beginning that time.

I do like that there’s some friction between D’Argo as captain and other members of the crew. Not surprisingly, it’s coming in the form of Chiana, who’s personality and tendencies are of course causing problems. She’s already someone who doesn’t deal well with being controlled, and D’Argo being the one to tell her what to do, given their past, is particularly hard for her to take. He’s desperately trying to pull things together and maintain a good (or at least, non-hostile) relationship with the people of the planet, and Chiana is probably the biggest threat to those attempts, and so he tries with very little success to rein her in.

I really like Paroos, the priest, although I wish we knew a little more about him. He doesn’t appear to be the same species as the other inhabitants of the planet, but does that mean he’s just another species that the planet is home to, or is he an offworlder? If it’s the latter, how did he come to hold a position of such influence on a planet that seems to hold a deep mistrust of offworlders in general? He’s a great force for peace on the planet under the new system in place, and appears to be almost universally respected by the others on the planet. I really want to know more about whether he held a role in bringing those changes about, and how exactly his position works and how he reached that point. Also, why exactly does his floaty chair have a buzz-saw in it? Unless he’s used to having to resort to that kind of violence on a regular basis (although he does mention that people get killed on their planet all the time and the political situation is extremely unstable, so it’s very possible), I’m not sure what purpose something like that is intended to serve. I suppose it could simply be a last-resort self defense thing (given his fragile appearance, I suppose it makes sense), but it kind of seemed out of nowhere that he would have something like that. Also, is that Johnathan Hardy voicing him? I can’t seem to find anything crediting who did his voice, but I can very much hear bits of Rygel there. If it isn’t, the two sound very similar, and it might be why Rygel has next to no presence in this episode.

And of course, everything leads up to Aeryn and John pointing guns at each other in the end. All of the build up of their troubled relationship over the past few episodes comes to a head here, as the frustration they’ve been keeping locked away (or drugged away, in John’s case) plays out as they suddenly have to fight the overwhelming urge to kill one another. John, who’s been practically addicted to the substance to keep his mind off of Aeryn, takes it particularly badly, and if he’s to be believed in what he’s saying, he’s either not faring as well in his attempts to resist, or there was more there for E’Alat to grab a mental hold on to spur him on to try to kill Aeryn than the other way around. Considering that she’s had to actually deal with her feelings regarding him and he’s literally been dealing with it by not dealing with it, either one makes sense.

All in all, I like this episode, although there’s quite a bit of it that I wish they had elaborated on more. As a starter to the Tormented Space adventures, it’s maybe a little underwhelming, but just as a run of the mill episode, it’s fine.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash the images of bughive man out of my brain, because ASDSFSAIOHA OH GOD.

Kevin

Season four has been a consistently solid season… until now.

I’m sorry. I didn’t care about the planet Ronon Dex must have come from. I didn’t care about the whole “We Must Bring The Clans Together” subplot, or the tired “We Care Nothing For Offworlders” routine. The whole deal with the Prince of Clan Whatsis surpassing his dead father – the Leader of Clan Whatsis – and supplanting Lucius Malfoy’s Bad Hair Day and burning the temple to the ground as a significant example of rabble rabble rabble.

Why? What do we care about any of that?

It felt like we were supposed to care, that this whole conflict should have mattered. But considering that the first thing we see of these Dreadlock Dudes is them bitching over the crew being there, and then getting shot? There was no impact. No feeling of “Hey, this could actually be a problem for Our Heroes”, other than the fact that it was Aeryn who shot them. Sure, by the middle of the episode we knew why it was a big deal, but until then I was bored. I wanted them to leave; there’s water all over most M-class planets, why not just scoop some off the other side and be done with it?

It might be because there was a lot that I could have enjoyed about this. We could have had more on why they needed the support of Clan Whatsis, maybe because the other clans are so xenophobic they’d be slaughtered if they were in charge. They could have brought more into the whole “We get a lot of criminals and fugitives here” aspect, and have a rival group of transients trying to sway the Dreadlocks another direction. They could have explained why Moya was hurt instead of just that off-hand remark. They could have made me care about any of it.

Instead, we get a tired villain (who I will now refer to only as Bee-head), a bunch of snooty-faced Dreadlocks harumphing at everything, an admittedly awesome replacement for Rygel who still didn’t really do much but be powerful and menacing, and an extremely disorienting opening sequence. Don’t get me wrong, I usually love the unsettling camera effects when they’re representative of something that’s going on, but these felt like they had no purpose.

Honestly, I can count what I liked about this episode on one hand:

Bringing the Crichton/Aeryn conflict to a head.

Naked Sikozu.

The concept of brainwashing outsiders for assassinations, thus keeping the populace in line and distrustful of spacers all in one go.

The acting of Our Heroes, which certainly rose above what they were acting in. Special mention – as always – to Claudia Black, Ben Browder, and Anthony Simcoe, for their amazing portrayals of frustration, confusion, dismay, and deep anguish.

That’s it. That’s all I found to really enjoy in this episode. I wish I had more to say about it, some deeper meaning that I can glean from the situation or writing or circumstances, but I honestly can’t.

Things to note:

It’s interesting to see Sikozu with a more subtle air of manipulation about her. Aside from the repeated awkward groping scene, all of her interactions with Prince Whatsis remind me more of Scorpius. With her spending a lot of time around him, perhaps he’s mentoring her a bit?

With the appropriate apologies to Tessa, I actually think Bee-head’s methods have merit. Sure, the execution is awkward, but think about it a bit more objectively: He implants a hypnotic suggestion into the venom, which gets amplified by his psychic abilities. The venom makes the impulse in the target, while he erodes their mental defenses. Potentially devastating.

Crichton seems to respect D’Argo’s word as Captain, pop-culture mocking aside. Chiana… doesn’t, although she’s seemingly reverting more and more to her teenager attitude.

We see a more lasting consequence of her sight powers: the time she’s blind is getting longer and longer, to the point where she thinks it might not go away at all at some point. A neat touch for continuity’s sake.

Aeryn’s making attempts at English phrases again. I believe this is another sign of her extending the olive branch, trying to get back in Crichton’s good graces. Considering his abuse of the brain-wipe vapors, he’s not buying it.

Noel

To back up Kevin, I don’t care. I don’t care a single bit about this feud between rival clans or the priest trying to solve it all or the son trying to live up to the legacy of his father or the president who just wants a war. That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s just not interesting on a show that constantly pushes itself out of the box. Strip it down to it’s… no, don’t even bother doing that. It’s already basic components. The priest puppet is great and the dreadlock Princess Leia buns are an interesting look, but looks alone aren’t enough to add spice to a tired story. I like the way our leads are involved, with Sikozu getting some nookie, Chiana being banished, and D’Argo struggling to be diplomatic, but our leads are stuck playing off of the equivalent of narrative cardboard. It’s dull. It’s flat. It lacks any weight and fails to leave any impression.

And to then jump to Tessa’s complaint, she’s absolutely right that our first look at Tormented Space is absolutely failing to live up to the expectations we were already predicting such a ridiculously over-the-top title would fail to deliver. Seriously, this is the absolute nastiest, most dreaded region of the cosmos, and the best you can come up with for its debut is a blah political squabble over clan leadership? We hear a throwaway mention that Tormented Space is beating Moya all to hell, but instead of, y’know, SHOWING US THAT SO WE CAN SEE AND FULLY APPRECIATE THE TORMENTING QUALITIES OF TORMENTED SPACE, it’s instead brushed off screen while we watch bickering about what clan has the upper hand on who. Someone really dropped the narrative ball on this one, which is disappointing at such a late point in the series when they’re trying to set up a harsh new region to become the new status quo backdrop for our heroes to scream in. I’m sorry, but you don’t promise Tormented Space, then show anything less than space that absolutely torments.

However, there is still a very strong element to the show. I’m not just talking about the interplay between our cast, the main part of being John and Aeryn venting some of their violent frustration with one another. That’s all amazing, but I’m speaking of the political assassination angle, the idea of a being who manufactures insects that fill a selected target’s head with subliminal prodding to a point where it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid following the direction of those prods. This is a fantastic idea and the way it’s used on Aeryn and John, first individually then against one another, is perfect and an absolutely inspired bridge to take their relationship down the next road. If only they hadn’t wasted it on the plot they did. Why does this story need to be on a brand new world? Why does it need to take place in Tormented Space? If you’re going to turn our characters into unwilling political assassins, involve it in Peacekeeper dealings so the consequences will be more far reaching. Or have Rygel finally return to his homeworld and attempt to reclaim the throne only for his friends to be brainwashed into frelling it up. There’s genuine hooks that could have latched this story onto events that already have history and weight and consequence… but instead they stick it on a disposable little one off that wastes the material about as much as the episode wastes the great Aussie character actor Bruce Spence.

It’s a waste. I very much look forward to seeing where this change in the Aeryn/Crichton dynamic goes, but it’s shoved beneath the drinking water and nearly drowned by the weight of the misguided mediocrity surrounding it.

And what was with the nonlinear jumps back and forth in time? What did that ultimately add to things that a linear progression wouldn’t? Why use it for part of the episode, then abandon it midway through?

And why the frell does the horny little bastard have a buzzsaw on his hoverchair!

Weston

You guys know why this episode sucked, right? No D’Argo tongue. First episode this season with no tongue, and this is the result.

Crichton tells Prefect Falaak that he should have met Aeryn’s mother. Odd thing, though, Crichton never met Xhalax either. That was T’John. She shot at M’John once, but went haring after Talyn.

Call me crazy, but I think Sikozu and Zerbat only made it to second base before Chiana and D’Argo interrupted. The awkward half-naked “wow, you’re really orange” stage of interplanetary relations.

All religious symbols should be circular and chain-driven. Discreet, concealable, and effective. I admit, if I was building weapons into a hoverchair they’d be pulse blasters or one of those bazookas from last episode, but this planet doesn’t seem very sophisticated in the technology department.

Aeryn is an assassin again. It’s is a running theme this season.

My major gripe this episode: They spend twenty minutes retreading the same five minutes from multiple perspectives. It establishes exactly where everyone was at the time of the murder, but we really didn’t need to see the same scenes ninety seconds apart. Well, most of them.

Crichton started teaching Aeryn phonetic English back on Talyn. She remembers it, maybe even kept T’John’s journal or a copy of it, and is now dropping phrases of it into conversation. It’s far from the first time she’s done that, but now it’s driving Crichton to his bug juice.

Dead Elder Gaashah tried to draw his knife while the assassination was going down. It looked like his harness was really loose, and when he tried to pull the knife the whole thing came with it. Unfortunate, but lucky for Aeryn. Could be a wardrobe malfunction that they threw in, could be intentional to illustrate the loss of combat skills with age. Either way, it looks odd in slow motion.

Moya’s hit twenty planets since reaching Tormented Space. That’s quite a bit of time between episodes. Also, quite a bit of distance looking for a chemical that’s made of two of the most common elements in the universe. Dihydrogen monoxide isn’t exactly chakan oil.

There’s a blink-and-you-miss-it scene towards the end during the denouement. Not even a full scene, just two cuts. Aeryn and Crichton, lying on a furry rug, holding hands after nearly killing each other. A small gesture, certainly, but after their recent separation and the line about the coin toss, it’s a nice touch.

The denouement itself is great. Zerbat gets a moment of awesome when he confronts Prefect Falaak over what he’s done.

It’s good to know that D’Argo can shrug off a pulse pistol shot to his center torso. Knocks him off his feet, but he’s back up in ten minutes and wrestling with Crichton in another couple arns. Hitting like a sissy, sure, but I’m fairly certain that Luxans haven’t shown any particular resistance to pulse fire before. Maybe he has subdermal plating that we never heard about.